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felassan · 3 years

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DA4 Lead Producer Scylla Costa’s BIG Festival talk, “Challenges of Dragon Age production during the pandemic”, can currently be rewatched on YouTube here starting roughly at timestamp 8:57:02 after a lil presenter blurb/intro. It’s 1 hour long. When it was streamed live, there was an English translation ‘voiceover’. There isn’t in this vid, however I want to post the link for Portuguese speakers, and also it’s neat for everyone to be able to see all the slides he presented with for themselves in context.

I don’t know if an English-language version will get put up so I’m sharing the notes I took during the talk below, in case anyone’s interested and because I might as well since I wrote them. The rest of this post is under a cut due to length.

Edit: Found a place to re-watch the English version of the talk

(Quick note: I didn’t note down everything, mostly things that caught my interest, so this isn’t exhaustive, and when I was watching I was real tired, so pls bear that in mind and don’t take these notes as bullet-proof 100% accurate gospel or direct quotes. If you watched it and think I’ve written down something wrong/misunderstood, let me know and I’ll fix. Also if you’re a Portuguese speaker and I’ve gotten something incorrect or missed something important etc, again just let me know.) **

** Edit: I’ve now gone through my notes while watching the talk again. I’ve filled in some of the gaps (although they still don’t cover everything said) and so forth, and now I’m no longer worried about there being possible errors in this post.

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For some context, this slide contained the breakdown of the talk’s structure. Bear in mind there are other slides present in the talk than the ones I’ve posted here, I didn’t include caps of all of them, just ones which were of note to me.

In the talk, chief Producer Scylla goes over challenges of DA4 production during the pandemic. He discusses the adaptations - necessary skills and learning from remote work - and he ponders on the future of teamwork.

After the launch of ME3 he became a producer, all his MMO and other experience helped a lot. He was on DAI for 3 years and MEA for 9 months, then Anthem. Today, on DA4, Scylla and another Lead Producer were the heads of the whole project, and there is his boss is the Executive Producer Christian Dailey.

^ the usual AAA game development cycle (brief introduction)

AAA games are games that are launched for several platforms simultaneously.

In BioWare’s case, the pre-production phase of the game development cycle can have from 5 - 30 people, and up to almost 60 people when they’re just about to go through the gate to production.

In the pre-production phase, they go through the game’s concepts and prototypes and start developing systems. They seek the game’s concept and focus, and its key features. They do lots of market research. In the case of BioWare, all their games are strong in narrative, so they have lots of tools related to game narratives and supporting the development of a narrative (cinematic design, dialogue system etc) that get focused on in this phase. Other parts of the team such as writers and cinematic design need these systems to do their own roles.

In BioWare’s case, the pre-production phase through to launch can take 4 - 6 years, but it does depend on the size of the team during development.

With regards to Dragon Age 4, they were coming close to the time when they would shift from pre-production to the production stage when the pandemic hit.

During the production phase is when the development of content and features takes place, with the systems mostly already existing from the pre-production phase. A few new systems may be developed in this phase. In the production phase is when things start escalating, and the team really starts growing, to like 2- or 3-fold the prior pre-production phase size.

(DA4 is currently in the production phase.)

In the alpha phase, features have to be fully implemented and systems all have to be running / working. All the game features should already be in the game by now. They test from pre-production onwards, but this phase is when they run heavy technical tests with lots of players trying to play at the same time. In the beta phase, the idea is that you should now have full content and that now you’re balancing it and running more and lots of different tests with players before launch. There are final tweaks and then the final launch, when in the weeks prior to launch, all the different business units and areas e.g. marketing team, technology team, publishing team, get together once a day and all of the game’s issues are reported and brought to the table to be prioritized. Then they decide the next steps re: these issues (this is known as ‘the war room’).

After the launch there are usually patches like day zero patches and other patches, this being standard industry practise. The last stage is the new content stage where there are DLCs and a game with more content.

On March 12th 2020, the team gathered to review the DA4 story in the new office. Everyone was very excited. (They had spent over 10 years in their last building and had noticed that with the team growing they needed more space. In August 2019 they found the new studio in the city center.)

Anyway that evening, they got an email from the CEO which contained instructions and said that due to the pandemic, they should from now all start working remotely. They had known that this happening was a possibility so they had been planning on how to have all the devs working from home, but initially less than 50% of the devs were able to work from home successfully/efficiently due to various issues e.g. you need a VPN to be able to log in remotely to do your job normally, varying home office setups. The day after this, the office was basically deserted, except for Scylla, the IT infrastructure people and one or two odd devs.

Scylla was part of the team that was working on allowing the devs to work from home. They first started looking at the short-term changes they needed to make to allow this.

“First, take care of our developers”.

When the pandemic first hit, their and Scylla’s [as Lead Producer] first priority was to look after the devs. Many of them are parents (schools and day-cares were shut, children were studying from home), others have relatives living with them, others have other personal circumstances which of course need to be taken into account when it comes to assessing what needs to be taken into consideration for this new scenario. So, they looked at each dev on a case-by-case basis in order to evaluate, speaking to each one and asking them what they could do to support them.

One of the first changes/adaptations they could implement was flexible working hours and flexibility around deadlines. Generally speaking the devs got a lot of support, EA was really good and really supported the devs especially in the first months of the pandemic (and they are still supporting them). Initially not all devs had suitable office spaces at home, some were working from the living room from laptops or at the kitchen table. The whole covid situation basically just happened over night and nobody was really ready to deal with that change. So their first step was to enable their devs to work remotely. As a producer, Scylla’s main task is to communicate with the team such as via a number of daily meetings. He doesn’t depend so much on powerful hardware.

“Enable developers to work remotely”.

This slide shows some of a BioWare audio team. Different teams have varying and specific needs in order to do their jobs and therefore in order to do them remotely. For example, the audio team need good-quality speakers and amplifiers, while the lighting and art teams need other specific equipment such as tablets and large screens. So there was a lot of work they had to do to go through each dev to understand their individual needs and what needed to be done for them. ‘Could they download the builds? Did they have the right performance [tech-wise]? Could they submit their changelists, their codes to the server?’

Some devs needed a more powerful internet connection as it would take 6-8 hours to download a build (some devs live rurally). Some needed a lot of cable, as they were working far away from their routers (sometimes up to 50m). As time went by things got better and better.

The chair devs work from is also important; a kitchen able chair etc is not suitable to sit in for long-term desk work, possibly leading to health issues like back ache and blood circulation problems in the legs.

Every 3 months they had money given to help devs buy new mice, keyboards, monitors - anything they needed really in order for their office setting at home to be improved. For a while, because lots of people [generally, in society] were needing and buying them, it was quite hard to buy things like webcams and microphones.

On mid- and long-term changes:

In terms of DA, we have to look at this from 2 perspectives, the change in the personal and the professional environments.

As a consequence of working from home, people tend to be less active during the day (even in an office, you go between meeting rooms, up and down stairs etc). Physical activity supports life quality and therefore work quality. Scylla noticed that he began to feel listless and such, and found that he needed to change his routine that he had initially developed when he started working from home, for example; having a normal start time (as in, have a semblance of structure in your day as if you were still working in the office site), get dressed at the normal time, not having meetings over lunch etc. This wasn’t just him, lots of other devs encountered this and had this experience too. Devs which adapted faster had better productivity and became more productive faster.

Scylla bought a stand-up desk which he can raise up and down, and at meetings he would be delivering a talk while standing or even while walking on a treadmill. Other devs also got stand-up desks. He tracked his body’s data on a Fitbit. These sorts of things helped improve physical and mental wellbeing. Other devs did similar things, like starting going out for jogs or began practising yoga. Essentially, everyone needed to make changes to their daily routine in comparison to what they had been doing prior to the pandemic.

The pandemic has been a thing for over a year now. In their location, every couple of weeks a new restriction is put into place or a rule is changed, and every two weeks there’s a new thing that you can and can’t do. Scylla also started moving around his property. He worked on his desk, fixed it up and painted - taking up a new hobby. Other devs picked up new hobbies too. These are good ways to be active and also to be somewhere else, i.e. to break up the working day and not be spending it all in one home office-type location. Scylla found that when he made these sorts of changes to his routine to improve his lifestyle, the data output by his Fitbit as indicators of his health/wellbeing etc improved, e.g. number of steps taken in a day, heartbeats per minute while at rest. As stated many of the other devs went through a similar process.

On the professional side of things:

They had to improve remote delivery of builds. Accessing things from home as a dev requires a VPN. They need to download a build every day and then upload it to the server after making their changes to the game. They had to work with infrastructure and research other tech, such as streaming tech to allow remote console access, in order to better facilitate this process. For remote access, they also had to work on adapting communications channels.

“Adapting channels of communication.”

In this slide, the team are working on the storyboards. Before you can implement motion capture & performance capture, you have to ‘run the storyboards’ like this. These are small illustrating drawings which reflect the drafts and are meant to quickly reflect the intention of the scenes that are to be built. Before the pandemic, the team would go to meeting rooms like this, sit down, talk and interact in person. After the pandemic, the question became ‘How do you do this over Zoom?’ You can, but it’s not quite the same; it’s harder to see peoples’ expressions, some people are embarrassed speaking over Zoom etc. Therefore they had to adapt their communications systems, and unlearn the ways in which they developed before in order to relearn and learn new ways of communicating.

Slack was a tool that they adopted on this front. Communications channels can be confusing on Slack, so there was a need to develop structure. For example, how quickly should someone reply (as a recommended convention for the purposes of work)? They had to define the process/procedures for the channels so it was clear for the team as a whole how it would all flow (this is important especially if you have a team with say 30 people or as a whole hundreds of people). Before the pandemic, they had stand-up meetings where they’d go around in a circle every morning and talk about their activities - what they’re going to be working on, any roadblocks they had encountered etc. The question arose ‘How do you replace these?’ They ended up doing Slack messages at a certain time of day and updating their statuses with some details on what they’re working on and color-coding (green - fine, yellow - need help, red - busy/blocked out).

Another issue that they faced was unforeseen - the number of meetings that devs were having really shot through the roof. When there wasn’t a good structure of communications channels, any conversation would become a meeting. Everybody began scheduling meetings left and right, and at the end of the day they would have little time left in which to actually work on their to-do lists. Hence, they had to work with the team to really analyze and be very pragmatic. ‘Which meetings needed to happen? Which didn’t? Is a specific meeting really necessary? Which meetings should be recurring? What can be done over Slack?’ This guideline had to be given to the team to help, and it improved things a lot. The number of meetings decreased a lot and they got more effective. For example, by making sure to set an agenda for meetings beforehand, and by having meeting notes (then a dev who didn’t really need to be at a meeting could skip attending and just quickly review the notes output after instead). They also decreased the standard length of meeting times from the default Outlook blocks of 1 hour and 30 mins to 55 mins and 25 mins respectively. This 5 minute change gave devs time for things like bio breaks (also 4 hours in a row at a computer in a home office with one meeting after another just isn’t good for a person).

“Adapting p-cap and mocap”.

On content:

From a content point of view, the most difficult thing in terms of the pandemic was adapting p-cap and mocap (performance capture and motion capture). They hire actors and it’s a large studio. The pandemic meant big limits to what they could and couldn’t do. The actors had to be masked and 5 meters apart in distance (although it doesn’t look like it in some of these shots due to angles). Also there could be no other person around in the studio - only the actors. The directors instead would ‘patch’ in remotely on big screens (you can see this in the second photo in the top right).

Before the pandemic, they felt that they wouldn’t be able to do p-cap or mocap properly remotely, as the directors would usually stand right next to actors giving guidance on their performance. The techs would also usually be near. But they adapted! The keyword is adapting, changing process. It’s harder and it’s different, but it is possible, and people start rethinking what is possible. What was said to be impossible before now is possible.

P-cap differs to mocap in that it also captures voice and facial expressions.

On the future of work after covid:

There will probably be more working from home and more flexibility for workers e.g. being able to work say 3 out of 5 days from home. It does depend on what a dev’s specific job is however. For example, the audio engineers require lots of specialist equipment and said equipment is of higher quality and quantity in the office. So, depending on role, devs might be working more often or less often from home.

Another development is that lots of devs are moving house. In lockdown etc people started reassessing what’s most important in life. Some are moving further away from the studio to get a cheaper rent or for example couples who both needed an office space to work from home from but their current place only had one area. Others are moving closer to nature for a better quality of life, and still others have other different reasons for doing so. Over 10 devs that he knows in fact have recently moved, including Scylla himself.

The pandemic changed certain skills being used by people on a daily basis. Scylla used as an example of this one of his soft skills, being able to tell from looking/interacting in-person with someone if they are stressed out. Obviously it’s less easy to tell if someone is stressed out when you’re remote, so you adapt different ways of checking in with people in the new situation. To continue carrying out his role as Lead Producer, he began checking in with his team pro-actively on the new comms channels and asking how they were doing.

Also, now that companies are more open to working remotely, there is going to be increased competition for hiring devs. They saw both sides of this coin at BioWare. They were able to hire devs from many places that they couldn’t hire from before e.g. Montreal, Vancouver, the US, as there’s less need for devs to relocate to Edmonton or Austin. This opens up opportunities to hire really intelligent and skilled people that they would not have had access to before.

Question and answer segment:

The pre-production phase has been concluded. They’re in the production phase.

They are not giving out a lot of details yet but Scylla is really excited as a big fan of the whole series. He thinks that with DA4, they will have the opportunity/possibility to launch the best story out of all DA games. He feels that the characters they’re making are amazing. He’s dying to say more but can’t.

When you work from home you need to keep your team as productive as possible. During the pandemic, when people started working from home, they noticed that some people became more productive and some people became less productive. They were analyzing it on a case-by-case basis so as not to make assumptions. They were interested in seeing what they could do to help. At the beginning of the pandemic, they were looking at the devs as people and seeing what they needed.

Production of DA4 still needed to continue during the pandemic because they want to be able to launch the game.

This slide shows a writer. Writing is an example of a role which is more able to work from home easily.

Their productivity did go down in the first month of the pandemic. After adaptations, some people then became more productive than they were before (this was role and personal situation-dependent, examples of this being artists and coders who were able to art and code at home without being interrupted, thereby being able to produce more). Covid has affected productivity in general, but this is part of our new reality. They have adapted and adjusted some deadlines. They have enough data (Scylla LOVES data) now to understand how long it will take them/how long they’ll need to launch the game. They have always had historical data for this purpose, but they’re doing more of this sort of thing now to ensure that they are doing things at the right time.

Remote hiring opens up the door to more talent joining, so if someone has talent geography will hold them back less. Some companies though may choose not to hire people from other countries due to labor issues, cumbersome legal aspects, time zones. But even in such cases there are activities for example that can be carried out while the rest of the team is asleep such as testing or working on the build, or there are cases where those companies still will want to hire a specifically/highly talented person even in spite of the potential legal aspects and so on.

On mental health: People were affected. There is the mental, physical and social impacts of the pandemic situation on people. EA supported them during the pandemic in terms of their mental wellbeing, there are specific companies (services offered, speaking to a therapist) that they can contact if they need something or help. EA had always been good at supporting them with this sort of thing but this has improved further during the pandemic. Another change was that they could/can take a couple of days off if they needed/need to because of the pandemic e.g. to take care of children, who were obviously not at school at the time. As a producer he had to be very mindful of all of this. How much they were monitoring peoples’ wellbeing really went up during the pandemic.

A question that was asked - in terms of DA4′s storybeats, is there anything in there that they decided to change due to the pandemic as it wouldn’t be sensitive or appropriate to include anymore, for example a plague plotline or something? Scylla’s answer is that DA and ME are games in which they try to have narratives that are relatable, which include things which people will identify with, so that players understand what characters are going through etc. Nothing in DA4′s plotline/storybeats has been changed (in the frame of this question, relating to the pandemic), as it didn’t have anything in it that could be specifically or a directly connected to a pandemic-type situation or anything. Of course the DA story has Blights and the Taint, but these are different & fantastical things and existed long before the pandemic situation. So this wasn’t the case with DA4 and there was no need to change anything, but this has happened to other games where they decided to change a storyline due to a strong correlation with something in the real world.

There were then concluding/closing remarks. The message he wants to send is that a crisis will always spark opportunities. Look at a crisis and try to see how you can grow.

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[☕ found this post interesting or useful? my ko-fi is here if you feel inclined. thank you 🙏]

#dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #da4 #dragon age #bioware #video games #covid mention #long post #longpost #wanted to write these up properly and post them yesterday but wasn't able to #mass effect #anthem

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thepriceofbeingaroseisloneliness · 3 years

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“But when I think about it now, I think he is the reason why I started doing that too. The classmate who screams in his room and hits the guitar…. Even remembering it now, it was quite a shock. What are you doing now?” Chapter 2: “The transfer student who introduced me to the noisy music”

Notes before reading: This is from Kaoru’s first book “Dokugen” released in October 2015. Kaoru started writing a montly section in “Ongaku to hito” music magazine during Dir en grey’s hiatus in 2012 and these publications were later selected and compiled in two books.

You can still get these books at the Tower Records site.

Feel free to correct me if you spot any mistake or any confusing parts.

*The title of Kaoru’s section /book “読弦“(dokugen) can be translated as “string reading” or “reading the strings”*

—–

Preface+Chapter 1

Chapter 2: “The transfer student who introduced me to the noisy music”

*This chapter/article was published on June 2012*

Well, this is the second one. I’m starting to write this before the first chapter has been published so I don’t know anything about the response but I’m going to write this one without worrying about that (Editor’s note: The manuscript of this chapter arrived before the first issue was released!)

Speaking about that, in the previous chapter I talked about purple stuff but, there are even more (purple) things at home, a lot of of picks in front of my eyes were purple. When I asked the person in charge of ESP the other day, it seems like this purple one will be released replacing the ones that are on sale right now.

Since I'm starting these articles/chapters, I want to know exactly how many guitars I own so I took a look at the magazines in which (the guitars) appeared in the past. I checked magazines like ‘Rokkin F’ ( Since 2007, it changed names to WeROCK), ‘Band Yarouze’, ‘Dir en grey Yarouze’ and‘GiGS’. Some magazines are gone now, but GIGS is still often published. After that, I asked the person in charge of ESP about this, but there are signs that probably some guitars are missing. Well, let’s try to find them by the time I write…. I wonder if I can find them….where on Earth are they?....

Before that, I should be worried if I can write so much, there must be many people who think so, including myself.

Because of that, this chapter’s guitar is the first one provided by ESP after DIR EN GREY was formed, Horizon Blue. I don't know what colour it’s on this page, when it comes to shape, it’s the same (than another Horizon’s models) so it would be misleading. The one I saw after a long time was still blue. Is it (the colour) a bit dull? I'm surprised that the colour of some guitars has faded, but I will talk about those ones as well.

As I just wrote, I used this guitar shortly after DIR EN GREY started, before the contract with ESP. I still remember how happy I was when I went to the store and got some strings and other things. I don’t know if it’s the same nowadays, but at that time I aspired to be endorsed by a guitar manufacture, so I bragged about that with my hometown’s acquaintances. Most of the live performances after the formation of the band might had been done with this guitar. I think that almost all the CDs recorded until the debut were recorded with this guitar as well. When I saw this guitar after a long time, there were scratches everywhere. At that time, as I was slamming it and hitting it right away, it’s damaged/chipped.

When I said that, I remember the guy who got me interested in metal and extreme/intense sounds. He got transferred when I was in middle school and even though he was just a middle school student, he set up an audio system in his room. First, he would make his family be in silence and then he recorded the audio of the TV with a radio cassette player. For me at that time, it was impossible to understand.

But getting along with such a guy got me into an evil world. That room was full of metal. Even though he had a neat and clean image, on the contrary, that he liked that kind of things …..at first I was upset in the back of my mind. After all, I was attracted to such a world I didn't know, so I often went out to hang out and listened to various things. I had them dubbed/re-recorded on a tape. Nowadays younger kids don’t know much about what a tape is…Do you know a tape called “metal master” (Sony Metal Master, it had ceramic shell halves and a ceramic tape guide insert) that was totally white, a bit heavy and was ridiculously expensive? I was like “Is this the price for a tape?”, I remember it was expensive...I’m nostalgic.

There were a lot of tapes in his house. At first, I didn't hear them at all, but as I listened to it, I liked GASTUNK, DEAD END, ROSEROSÉ, and Kinniku Shōjo Tai. After that, I started listening to X and COLOR, and it became an opportunity for me to play the guitar seriously. Anyway, I started to like fast songs. But overseas metal was still unfamiliar to me at this time, there was a chance to start listening right after this, but I'll write about it on another occasion. As there were also guitars at this guy’s room, I played the guitar (more like pretending to play) while listening to records there every day, but when I was in high school, he was in a different school so around that time we didn’t hang out that much.

When I went to his house for the first time in a while, the music he was listening to was noisy, and he was just hitting the guitar on the bed while playing it with a roaring sound. When I saw it, I thought, "Oh, this guy is already crazy," and I didn't meet him anymore…..I was pretty scared. But when I think about it now, I think that's why I started doing that too. The classmate who screams in his room and hits the guitar…. Even if I remember that now, it was quite a shock. What are you doing now?

When I was using this guitar, I came to live in Tokyo. I was desperately following the speed of the cycle of creating songs, recording and lives. Still, every day was exciting and fun. I didn't have any money at all, but I thought about many things with everyone and we talked a lot about our previous stories/experiences.

I don't think I'm doing it right now, rather; we are talking about months ahead making plans. It's always fun to think about the band and move on to it. Of course, there are many things that are troublesome, but if something doesn’t go smoothly, my feelings become stronger and I feel like I can adapt/ I got toughen. Right now, with a few things, I’m like "Hey, things will work out”, I’ll do something about it, is that a problem? But the hardest thing is when I can't think those things.

Well, even if there are times like that, it makes you feel alive.

It has nothing to do with guitars, but the In-N-Out Burger which I definitely want to eat when I go to the west coast of the United States, opened in Tokyo for only one day…..I wanted to try it!

Then the chapter is over, see you next month!

(Addition) After this, this transfer student will appear in this column/articles many times. I'm really wondering what's he is doing right now!

Chapter 3

#dir en grey #kaoru #dokugen #translation

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mystickitten42 · 3 years

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AO3 Tag Game

Thanks so much for the tag @peachpety 😘 I thoroughly enjoyed reading yours.

1. How many works do you have on AO3? 27 (+ 2 in fests) 2. What is your total AO3 word count? 134,448 (But if things go according to plan, I’ll be adding another 50-60k to that in 2-3 months). 3. How many fandoms have you written for and what are they? I’ve only ever published HP (all Drarry, except for one rare pair that’s part of an upcoming non-anon fest). But before I got into Drarry, I experimented with some dystopian Malec (Shadowhunters). 4. What are your top five fics by kudos? Potter’s Ravine (E, 23k)

Harry is undeniably numb. Still reeling from the sudden death of his godfather, he’s back at the Dursleys and everything seems hopeless. One day bleeds into the next. But, as they say, nature abhors a vacuum…

Draco is unimpressed. The Dark Lord and his infernal giant snake have taken over Malfoy Manor and he’s confined to his rooms. He feels like a prisoner and it’s just not right. He’s a Malfoy. Itching for confrontation he decides to go visit Harry Potter.

Things don’t go according to plan.

The Time in Between (E, 42k)

Harry never wanted to be the Chosen One. Draco refused the Dark Mark. Together, they set out to create something new. But can they outrun their destiny?

~ or ~

The one where Harry sets everything on fire, Draco confronts the darkness within, and Narcissa will do anything to keep them safe.

Light up Your Lust (E, 1k)

All it takes is a Cornish Pixie, a spilled potion and everything becomes quite clear.

Malfoy sputters, “That’s ridiculous, Potter. I don’t want to – ”

“Then tell me to stop.”

But the only noise Malfoy makes is a breathy sigh as Harry dives back in and kisses his jaw, plunders his incandescent lips, before he follows the glowing path south…

The Naughty List (E, 2K)

In which Hermione takes Harry to an art class and the model is familiar, blond, and pointy.

Malfoy steps up onto the round platform and casually lets his robe slip to the ground. As he adopts a pose, Harry’s jaw drops. Draco Malfoy is a work of art.

“Close your mouth, Harry,” Hermione whispers, and Harry does.

When Death Comes Calling (T, 2k)

It’s All Hallows’ Eve and as Harry investigates a string of seemingly related deaths, there’s one he hopes to prevent. He looks over Harry’s shoulder and Harry turns too. They both see it, the dark translucent figure making its way to shore.

~ Or ~ Getting together in the face of Death. Literally.

5. Do you respond to comments, why or why not? OMG, I appreciate each and every single comment I receive. When I’m feeling down, I go back and re-read comments. I do try to respond to every one, but sometimes it takes a little while (depending on spoons, life, and writing deadlines). 6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending? I love happy endings, so most of my fics end happily or hopefully. But I have one fic, written for My Bloody Valentine 2021, that does not have a happy ending. You’re the Only One for Me (M, 1k, MCD, mind the tags)

After all these years, Draco's still the one.

7. Do you ever write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve every written? I have not written any crossovers... yet. I might. I might not. But I have contemplated Drarry with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (I’m a big fan, hence the ‘42′ in my pseud), or with Lost Souls (by Poppy Z. Brite, a vampire novel set in New Orleans).

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic? I’d have to say any ‘hate’ I’ve received has been minimal (although it thoroughly bummed me out at the time). But I received a lot of support from fellow Drarry authors and took their advice (deleted the comments without responding to them). Many others have received comments far worse than those I received and it makes me sad. 9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind? Ha! You may have noticed 4/5 of my top five are rated E. I love reading and writing smut. I’ve mostly written M/M, but I do have some F/F in the works. I adore porn with feelings, and angsty, angry sex that leads to feelings.

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen? Not to my knowledge. 11. Have you ever co-written a fic before? I never thought I would (I’m too much of a control freak 😂) but I co-wrote two during Exploding Snap 2021, and I had a blast! It was so much fun, amazingly refreshing, and I would totally do it again. The Stars on the Calendar (T, 2k, with @anaxandria-writes)

Harry accepted there were many things he and Draco would always argue about. He just didn’t think sex would ever be one of them.

Midnight Rendezvous (T, 696 words, with @cequonveut)

The Fat Lady gets an eyeful while portrait hopping down the seventh-floor corridor.

12. What’s your all-time favourite ship? Drarry!!!!! But I also love Grudders, Roarmac (thanks Peach!), Jeddy, Scorbus, Charlie Weasley with pretty much anyone, and various poly ships. Outside of HP, I also have a soft spot for Malec and Jimon (Shadowhunters) and Steve/Ghost (Lost Souls). 13. What was the first fandom you wrote for? HP is the only fandom I’ve published in. But as I mentioned above, I have an incomplete Malec burning a hole in my hard drive. Maybe one day I’ll finish it… or maybe I won’t… 14. What’s your favourite fic you’ve written? As much as I adore writing drabbles and short fics, I really love to become immersed in my longer chaptered fics. All of them are my favourites. I’ve already mentioned my Old Magic series (Potter’s Ravine, The Time in Between, and I’m currently working on the third installment). But my other recent fav is my Wireless fic: Until It All Comes Undone (E, 38k).

Following his confrontation with Voldemort, Harry returns from King’s Cross Station completely changed. He wakes up at Privet Drive with no memory of his past, the war or magic. Petunia, widowed and suffering from empty nest syndrome, is only too happy to turn Harry into Dudley 2.0.

But something’s not quite right. Plagued by recurring nightmares, Harry can’t help but feel something is missing. A bottle of his cousin’s LSD helps him to forget his worries… Magic may not be real, but the hallucinations and the hot blond he meets all feel pretty magical to Harry.

Having turned his back on his family, Draco is determined to start over and do the right thing. But he’s never made good decisions when it comes to Harry Potter. When Potter—presumed dead, but very much alive—unexpectedly returns, Draco will do anything for a second chance. Even if it means pretending not to know who he is…

This idea burned inside me for nearly a year and refused to be silent. Writing this terrified me, because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to write it the way I wanted it to be written. Completing this story was an amazing journey and really taught me to believe in myself. (And, of course, I’m eternally grateful to my amazing beta, @peachpety 🥰)

I apologise in advance if I’m double tagging anyone (and, of course, no pressure!) @pennygalleon, @andithiel, @cequonveut, @anaxandria-writes, @eelwinks, @thesleepiesthufflepuff, @evaeleanor

#tagged #tag game #AO3 works #writing #my fic

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politalysis · 3 years

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# What has happened to JK Rowling?

Growing up in the early 2000s immediately made Harry Potter a huge part of your childhood. Even if you never read the books or watched the films, you can probably name the three main characters. Even if you weren’t interested in Harry Potter in the slightest, you probably know your Hogwarts house. It’s incredible what Harry Potter did for our generation all over the world. Children would stay up on their eleventh birthdays anxiously awaiting a Hogwarts acceptance letter, knowing full well that owl was never going to come. Our imagination kept the dream of going to Hogwarts and learning magic alive anyway. Even now at the age of 23, I can for the most part keep a conversation flowing with anyone who has read the books or even just watched the films. You could even go as far as to say it was our generation’s Lord of the Rings.

JK Rowling came from very humble beginnings. She suffered with depression in her childhood and early teens, and lost her mother to multiple sclerosis in 1990. These struggles inspired her a lot when writing Harry Potter. She channeled her grief and pain into her writing. In 1992, she married a man she had met whilst living in Portugal, but Rowling suffered domestic abuse at his hands and the couple separated a year later. She lost her job and moved to Edinburgh in Scotland, where she had to sign up for welfare benefits, which left her a poor and depressed single mother spending her time writing in coffee shops. When she finished writing Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, twelve publishers rejected the opportunity to publish the book. Once someone finally agreed to publish the book, it became the best selling children’s book of the year.

We all know how the story goes from there. Rowling wrote six more Harry Potter books, eight films were made, and Rowling went from a poor vulnerable single mother to a multi millionaire in the space of a few short years. Harry Potter is now a global brand estimated to be worth about $15 billion. The last four books have each consecutively set the record for the fastest selling book in history. Rowling is now the richest author in the world, with a net worth of $92 million. But as well as money, JK Rowling has over 14 million followers on Twitter. This gives her massive influence as well as money. Rowling seemed to initially use this influence for good, spreading mental health awareness, LGBT inclusivity, interacting with fans and creating a website for all us Harry Potter fans to determine our houses and let our wands choose us.

I remember being 8 years old when Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince was released, and I was attending a religious school where some parents complained and called to ban Harry Potter over the controversial decision JK Rowling made regarding Dumbledore’s sexuality. Rowling had made the claim that Dumbledore was gay. Looking back, the controversy was ridiculous and I can only imagine how embarrassed some of those parents must be. I also remember as I got older, re-reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows I noticed more that the emotion behind Dumbledore’s relationship with Grindelwald was one he held with a romantic love. So years later, when several members of the LGBT community attacked Rowling for only deciding Dumbledore’s sexuality after the books were written, I publicly defended her with my knowledge that that simply wasn’t true. I had this image of Rowling in my mind, that she had always been on the right side of this debate. She had always been inclusive and supportive of LGBT people as far as I could see, and I just didn’t understand the issue. Rowling had always expressed a centre-left political perspective, and although I didn’t agree with all her views, they seemed relatively uncontroversial.

When Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was released, I hated it. It was a literary disaster, completely disrespectful of the original book series, the characters were a shell of the characters we had grown up with, the plot was almost deliberately ridiculous and overly elaborate and I immediately dismissed it as not canon. I have never forgiven JK Rowling for publicly stating the book was canon. She almost destroyed a whole two decades of her own hard work and the franchise that she’d built that had been like a home for a whole generation. All because she wanted to grab a few extra quid for a terrible book she didn’t even write. To this day I can’t help but wonder if she has even read the book. If I had written the masterpiece that is Harry Potter, I would view the Cursed Child as an insult. Perhaps I’ll even write a review one day, just for fun. Rowling also annoyed me by going back on her story, regretting pairing Ron and Hermione together and not pairing Hermione with Harry. Ron and Hermione are my favourite couple from the story, and their relationship had so much meaning. I couldn’t believe that the author who wrote such a clever and consistent relationship between two beloved characters could ever regret it. At this point in my life, I was beginning to wonder if perhaps Rowling was losing her mind. It was almost like she was trying to destroy her legacy.

As more years passed, the Fantastic Beasts films were released. The first film looked promising, but the second film was yet another disaster. Again, it was inconsistent with the franchise as we knew it, for some reason Hogwarts was full of people wearing 3 piece suits instead of the robes they wore in the Harry Potter series and Minerva McGonigall appeared as a teacher despite the fact that canonically there is no way she could have been old enough. The film was a disaster with both fans and critics hating it. Amongst this mess came controversy in December 2019. Rowling lost all respect she had once held amongst the transgender community when she made a public statement supporting Maya Forstater, a British woman who lost her employment tribunal case against her employer who fired her over transphobic comments. Six months later on June 6 2020, Rowling criticised the term “people who menstruate” and stated: "If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives." Rowling’s views on these issues were heavily criticised by GLAAD and even by the actors from the Harry Potter movies including lead actors Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson.

Rowling published a 3,600 word essay in response to the mass criticism of her views four days later. The essay did her no favours, as she wrote: “When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside.” She seemed to be suggesting that trans women are often just men disguised as women in order to trick or even harm other women. This obviously angered the transgender community even more, and women’s refuge shelters that allow trans women were reporting no rise in violence as a result, children’s charities that support gender non conforming children were criticising Rowling, she was being made to give back awards and ultimately Rowling was labelled a Trans exclusionary radical feminist, a term often abbreviated to TERF.

JK Rowling is the perfect example of how money and influence can make someone forget their roots so easily. For someone who survived poverty, domestic abuse and sexual assault, she is so lacking in self awareness and how the things she has said and done can be harmful to transgender people. It is widely reported that transgender women are at more risk of harm in female restrooms than cisgender women. With acceptance becoming the norm, transgender people are feeling more safe to come out now than ever before, and so the rise in numbers of the community is huge, especially amongst our generation who grew up with Harry Potter. For a young transgender teenager to grow up wondering how Hogwarts would accommodate them, only to hear the author who gave us Hogwarts in the first place disapprove of equal rights for transgender people, must be very disheartening. However, JK Rowling has proven that she has no idea how powerful the legacy her books created really is. She was tasked with following up the Harry Potter series, and what she gave us was inconsistent and very poorly written screenplays. I have read better sequels on tumblr. Lots of them. Hogwarts doesn’t belong to JK Rowling, it belongs to the fandom. And I’ll be willing to bet my last penny that if Professor McGonigall witnessed any bullying of transgender students in her classroom (or indeed the girls bathroom!) she’d absolutely defend the victim without a moment’s hesitation. Hermione would decorate the Gryffindor common room with little blue, pink and white flags in support of a transgender first year who’d just been sorted into Gryffindor. Luna Lovegood would sit and befriend any trans student who looked lonely, and Ginny would dish out a bat bogey hex to anyone who dared pick on them. No matter what JK Rowling thinks, Hogwarts is not hers to ruin. It is ours. Regardless of what makes us different, Hogwarts is our home.

#jk rowling #harry potter #hogwarts #gryffindor #hufflepuff #ravenclaw #slytherin #gay dumbledore #trans rights #edinburgh #professor umbridge #fuck rowling #cursed child is not canon #ron and hermione #lgbtq #lgbt representation #writing

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jacaranda-bloom · 3 years

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FIC WRITER QUESTIONS

Thank you to the lovely @allwaswell16 @runaway-train-works @so-why-let-your-voice-be-tamed @uhoh-but-yeah-alright and @evilovesyou for tagging me to answer some questions about my writing.

1) How many works do you have on AO3?

2) What’s your total AO3 word count?

901,445 (Hoping to hit the Magic Million by the end of the year!)

3) How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

1 (One Direction)

4) What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

When Tomorrow Comes 1155

The Baby Whisperer 950

Love, Ever After 898

Harry Poppins 856

Play Me A Memory 760

More under the cut…

5) What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Oh gosh. Uhm. I don’t really write angsty endings? All my fics have Happy Endings and most have epilogues to round them out and tie them up in a bow. Perhaps I’d say If You’re Out There (I’ll Find You Somehow) purely because (spoiler ahead) the epilogue is written 100 years into the future so they’ve both passed.

6) What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

Interestingly, I would actually say the answer is the same as above, If You’re Out There (I’ll Find You Somehow). The epilogue is so uplifting and I cry happy tears every time I re-read it. It’s written from the POV of their granddaughter and you get to see the world they had a hand in changing for the better through her eyes, so you get a sense of how impactful their lives were on the rest of society. Oof, tearing up right now just thinking about it.

7) Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve written?

Yeah, I have actually. I really enjoy doing new takes on an existing universes, although they aren’t always the easiest thing to pull off tbh. I’m not sure which I would say is the craziest, but the hardest to write was definitely The Peter Pan/Hook AU.

Harry Poppins - Loosely based on the book/movie Mary Poppins, but without any magical aspects.

Playing To Win - Set in the Big Brother house.

The Pirate and The Piper - A Peter Pan/Hook AU which I took a lot of liberties with.

In The Still Of The Night - My Dirty Dancing AU.

A Hungry Heart - This is a Great British Bake Off AU that is due out in September for the Cliche Fic Fest!

8) Do you write smut? If so what kind?

Whoa Nelly. Yeah, I do. All the time. Every fic actually. There’s only one, Exposed, the only fic I’ve published that’s not rated Explicit and doesn’t have smut. But, to be fair, the challenge was to write exactly 666 words and I still managed to get the implication in there. Plus, Louis was naked and Harry was applying body paint for the majority of the story, so like, I think I can get a free pass on that one - I tried!

In terms of what type of smut, I guess it varies depending on the story. I tend not to push the boat out too far, but I do dabble in BDSM in quite a few of my fics. A recurring theme in the comments I receive is that my smut scenes are well constructed and detailed, without being too tedious or drawn out, which is lovely feedback to get because they can be challenging to write.

9) Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

Absolutely. Every single one.

10) Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Not often, people are usually so kind, but there have been a couple.

11) Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I’m aware of!

12) Have you ever had a fic translated?

Yeah, quite a lot, particularly on Wattpad, all with my full consent. That said, I’m thinking of stopping this because it’s getting a bit out of hand and I’ve been feeling uncomfortable about it recently for various reasons that I won’t bore you with here.

13) Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Nope! I don’t think it’s really my thing tbh. I get very in my head about writing and struggle even to brainstorm or share too much until I’m well into a story.

14) What’s your all time favorite ship?

Of the 47 fics I’ve written, there are 45 Larry, 1 Narry, and 1 Louis/Dermot O’Leary (I think mine is still the only fic with this ship hahahaa), so that’s probably a good indication of my fave writing ship.

15) What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

I have one lonely WIP sitting on AO3 from 2018. I keep promising myself I’ll finish it and it’s on my schedule every year, then I get distracted by other fics/fests and it gets pushed back. Plus, it needs a complete rewrite because my style has developed so much since I started it, so it’ll be a big job. Based on that, I think that the fic, in its current form, won’t ever be finished as the rewrite will completely wipe out what it was, although the underlying plot will still be there.

16) What are your writing strengths?

World building (or so I’m often told). I write very visually and people often say they can imagine the scene exactly, or that it’s like a movie, or that they think it’s actually a real place I’m describing, when most of the time it absolutely isn’t, it’s just something I’ve created in my weird brain.

17) What are your writing weaknesses?

Dialogue (although my lovely beta disagrees) and telling rather than showing. They’re both things I’m actively working on.

18) What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I’ve never really considered it. It’s not something I’d shy away from necessarily, but it’s just never come up.

19) What was the first fandom you wrote for?

One Direction. First and only.

20) What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

Wow. This is really tough because it changes over time. I find that once I’ve finished a fic I don’t want to revisit it for a few months because I’m kind of over it. But I find comfort in them after a while, like I get to go back to that happy place and immerse myself in that world and the characters again, similar to catching up with an old friend. It’s familiar. I think I also like different stories for different reasons and I’m drawn to various ones depending on my mood. My top 3 (although, ask me next week and the list will probably be completely different!) would probably be:

1. If You’re Out There (I’ll Find You Somehow). Written for the hybrid fic fest (a fest I created just for this fic lol). It’s not everyone’s cup of tea due to the hybrid aspect, but it’s one of the stories I feel is the most rounded from a character development perspective and the world building was pretty epic, if I can be so bold as to throw that out there myself!

2. No Going Back. One of my Big Bangs from 2020. I adore the way their relationship develops in this fic and the setting (as remote lighthouse keepers) was such a lot of fun to write. Plus I got to collaborate with an amazing artist who created an entire website as an accompanying travel blog which was truly wonderful.

3. From The Heart. This is a series I wrote for wordplay back in 2019. I had no idea that what I was doing was so unusual and so meta by having Louis essentially write for the equivalent of wordplay in the fic. It was such an fun way to share my writing process and challenges I encounter (exactly how many synonyms tabs do I have open at any one time?!) and I thoroughly enjoyed the outcome (although getting there was definitely a struggle).

This was really fun and thanks to anyone who made it this far! Writing brings me so much joy and is a wonderful outlet for all the imaginings in my head, so I appreciate everyone who supports me and joins me on that journey.

I’m pretty late with this and I’m not sure who has already done it but I’ll tag @fallinglikethis @homosociallyyours @lululawrence @reminiscingintherain and @beau-soleil-louis if they’d like to do this and haven’t already.

#August 13 2021 #fic writer questions #tag games #this was really fun!

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deadlyglacier · 3 years

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20 Questions tag~

I was tagged by @mythicamagic thank you senpai~<3

How many works do you have on AO3?

40 right now, plus 1 that is still hidden because of the SOFA Exchange event. (I’m still a lil fish.)

What’s your total AO3 word count?

486,920! That’s so amazing to me!

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

InuYasha - A Feudal Fairytale (18)

FullMetal Alchemist (18)

Mass Effect Trilogy (3)

Let’s Play (Webtoon) (1)

Kingdom Hearts (1) But I hope to write for many more fandoms in the future! I have ideas for fics for Castlevania, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Last of Us Part II, and more!

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

#1. Stardust FemShep/Garrus, Mass Effect Trilogy, Rated Explicit. A retelling of the Shepard/Vakarian love story, with lots (and LOTS) of sexiness, from Garrus' point of view. Starts from before the Omega-4 and will end sometime after the end of ME3. Trying to stay as true to the game as possible, while adding some things happening off camera and a new ending.

#2. Flamingo Sess/Kag, Inuyasha, Rated Explicit Kagome's method of beating the summer heat attracts a certain demon lord...

#3. Hawk Sess/Kag, Inuyasha, Rated Explicit Kagome and Sesshomaru discover they have a mutual attraction for each other after a battle and a slight comedic incident brings them together. At first their relationship seems entirely sexual, but eventually evolves into something real. What will this romance mean for Naraku? Or even the future? *TRIGGER WARNING FOR CHAPTER 6! MAJOR VIOLENCE AND TRAGEDY* Very, very loosely based on "A Mere Digression" by elle6778

#4. Daisy Sam/Charles, Let’s Play, Rated Mature Sam wakes up somewhere unfamiliar with a splitting headache with no memory of the night before. Takes place right after the S2 finale. First chapter was my prediction for what would happen next, and then three other “wishful thinking” chapters happened, lol.

#5. Chemistry Ed/Winry, FullMetal Alchemist, Rated Mature A look at how the relationship between Ed and Winry developed after Brotherhood ended. Cute, sweet, funny, and hot (eventually—y'all that know me know I gotta have some NSFW in there).

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I try to respond to everyone, especially when a fic of mine has just been posted, but sometimes I just forget. If I haven’t responded to your comment, please know it’s just because I’m a big dumb and forgot! I love getting comments, and I reread them all the time! I just feel like there’s a time limit to when I can respond to them--if I let too much go by, it’s awkward if I reply. Gah, but that’s just me getting in my own head, I guess. I’ll do better!

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Oof, definitely Psychology, a fic I wrote for RoyEdOTPoly this year. The prompt I got was dark, and I didn’t see any way around an angsty ending. Read at your own risk!

What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

Well, aside from the last fic, I try to write happy endings for all my fics! But, if I have to name names, I’m torn between Zoology (another FullMetal Alchemist fic, RoyEd, for RoyEdOTPoly this year) and Stardust (my Mass Effect fic, which is long, but so worth it, in my opinion). Both are very fluffy in the end!

Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve written?

Argh... I don’t really like crossovers, to be honest. I actively avoid them when looking for fics to read. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t thought of writing them myself. (I’m a total hypocrite, I know.) I had an idea for an Inuyasha x The Sims fic, years ago, that I never did anything with. The premise was basically Inuyasha and Kagome would get trapped in the game somehow (via the jewel or magic or something), and they’d be controlled by Souta, Kagome’s friends, Hojo--all sorts of different people who think the fact that Kagome and Inuyasha are in the game is just some kind of silly mod. I probably won’t write it, so if anyone is interested in that crazy idea, have at it! You have my blessing. <3 I also have a crazy crossover idea for what I call an “Ultimate OT3″ of mine that I’ve mentioned to my friends, but I haven’t actually written down yet: Sesshomaru/Alucard/Sebastian Michaelis. So be on the lookout for that!

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

I wouldn’t call it “hate” so much as “mansplaining,” but I have gotten a couple of comments that made my eyebrow twitch on Stardust--both on AO3 and FFN. Just dudes (and I’m fairly certain they were dudes, just from their tone) trying to explain why a certain plot twist wouldn’t work, or tell me how to save Sidonis in the actual game (which I already knew, that person just didn’t read what I wrote). I’ve also gotten a comment on one of my more controversial fics, Hippology, on FFN, where the person asked me if I thought my summary was K-Rated (which, admittedly, it does need to be for the site, and mine wasn’t--because of a single word). I changed it and messaged them saying it was fixed. Going to that commenter’s profile, however, proved to be fairly enlightening... They’re nuts. They have another profile, too. Read at your own risk. Yikes. There’s also a team of people on FFN who make it their life’s mission to report stories with rule violations. I’ve gotten a comment from one of them as well. These people are not mods, they just like to pretend they are--one of them even made their name look official! “CU Administration,” gtfo dude. I also recently got one of my fics removed from FFN. It wasn’t even one of my sexiest ones! They put me in timeout for 48 hours, and when I was finally able to publish something new on the site again, I posted Hippology (my centaur smut), and it’s still up as I type this. (Wonder how long it’ll take them to notice?) And since the fic that got taken down was a SessKag fic, I’m thinking it might have been a petty SessRinner who reported it to the “authorities” of FFN, because another friend of mine got hers taken down not long after mine, and it was also SessKag. Just my tinfoil theory, anyway!

Do you write smut? If so what kind?

Yes, yes, yes. It’s practically all I write. I do all sorts of smut, from romantic, sensual stuff, to specific kinks, to monsterfucking--all that good stuff. Can’t change me~<3

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

God, I hope not!

Have you ever had a fic translated?

I don’t think so. No one has asked me if they can translate one, anyway.

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Not yet! I’m open to the idea, and I’ve had little discussions with my fic-writing buddies about it, but nothing’s come out of it just yet. Keep your eyes peeled!

What’s your all-time favorite ship?

Oh, now come on! I can’t pick just one! But I’ll give you a top 3 (in no particular order, because they change places a lot, depending on how obsessed I am with them at the moment). Inuyasha: Sess/Kag FullMetal Alchemist: Roy/Ed Mass Effect: Garrus/FemShep

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

I have a couple of stories that I deleted from my original FFN account that I’d like to re-write and re-post on AO3, but I don’t think I’ll ever get around to it. There were a couple of Inu/Kag fics I had in-progress, and then a Koug/Kag fic. I recently rewrote and reposted my SessKag fic from years ago, Hawk, on FFN, AO3, and Dokuga! So maybe all hope isn’t lost. I’m even writing a sequel for Hawk! All the stories I have in-progress right now I plan on finishing. At some point, lol.

What are your writing strengths?

Dialogue, without a doubt. It’s my favorite thing to write, aside from smut, of course--which is another strength of mine.

What are your writing weaknesses?

Descriptions, ugh. I try to do them well, but I always feel like they get stale. So I keep them somewhat vague, because in my mind, I think readers will fill in the gaps themselves whether you describe something immaculately or not--they’ll see what they want to see, and that is totally fine in my book! Or maybe I’m just making excuses, lol. I’ll only describe something in a lot of detail if I want the reader to focus on that--usually an outfit, accessory, or weapon--otherwise, I leave it up to their imagination (I don’t want manipulate it too much, I suppose).

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

Wildly unnecessary unless that author speaks the language as well, or if certain words already exist in the fandom’s translations (ex. “youkai,” “alkahestry,” etc).

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Inuyasha, and the fic(s) I wrote in the beginning were terrible. I want to burn all traces of them off the face of the earth. I was in middle school. I was young and stupid.

What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

I gotta go with Stardust. It’s the longest fic I’ve ever completed at more than 160k words. I was so immensely proud when I typed “The End,” and I was able to say to myself “I did it.”

I tag: @glassesmcfancyhair @willowsrain

#SessKag #RoyEd #SamCharles #Shakarian #Inuyasha #FullMetal Alchemist #Let's Play #Mass Effect #fanfiction #writers supporting writers #q and a #I don't know what else to put so here

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chaos-monkeyy · 3 years

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Fic writer tag game! sort of tagged by @frankthesnek 😁

1) How many works do you have on AO3?

190! Climbing a lot faster towards the 200 mark than I did at the 100 mark, thanks to embracing the joy of drabbles, short fics, and deciding sometimes a quick fic without endless editing is in fact plenty good enough 😂

2) What's your total AO3 word count?

673,204 words total including various collaborative or group efforts that I didn't write alone (incidentally, I missed hitting exactly 666,666 recently by TWELVE FUCKING WORDS. Just close enough to make me go nnnnooooo..!! when I noticed... but not quite enough to be worth trying to edit my fics down by 12 words exactly 🙈 (and tbh it wouldn't quite feel the same as posting something actually tailored to hit that mark on purpose in the first place)

3) How many fandoms have your written for and what are they?

Twelve! (essentially, anyway - if you could all of Star Wars as a single large fandom)

Star Wars, Stargate, The Witcher, Midsomer Murders, Assassin's Creed, The Expanse, The Dresden Files, RPF, Stormlight Archive, The Mentalist, Aquaman, and Good Omens.

it's one heckuva skewed distribution though, the vast majority of my fics are SW, followed by stargate, and the rest trail off from there.

4) What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

All Geraskier Witcher fics, that being the biggest and most current fandom and ship I've ever been actively writing for 😂 - A Tight Fit, Stolen Moments, Undignified, Keep it up, and Intoxicating.

5) Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

Yup, always! Because I love getting them and I also love when I get replies on comments I leave on other writers' fics. And I like connecting with people 😊

6) What's the fic you've written with the angstiest ending?

Hands-down it's my "Zombie / what's in your head" MCD thranto fic. I have a small handful of others with ambiguous or bittersweet endings, but that one is the only thing I've ever written that merits the Sad Ending and Hurt No Comfort tags (and oof does it ever merit them)

7) What's the fic you've written with the happiest ending?

hmmm... most of my fics have a happy ending in the "happy ending" wink-wink nudge-nudge 😉😏 sense at the very least 😂

But I'm probably gonna go with Curious Creatures (thranto filthy fairytale AU) because it really culminates with that "lived happily ever after" vibe. As opposed to the sort of.. "happy in the present and immediate future" happy ending of my typical in-'verse fics.

8) Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you've written?

Nope, I've thought of a few but never quite gotten around to writing one (maybe someday!). I have some weird fucking AUs that I really like though 😂

9) Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Yes, but somehow very little? i.e. a whole lot less than I would expect to receive given what I write sometimes 😅 Worst hate I've gotten was actually on twitter rather than on AO3, once directed at me for an incest kink fic someone took offense to (it was mostly just funny), and once indirectly in a different fandom (seeing people making fun of a piss kink fic because they took offense to it.. existing in the character tag?).

I've had people be actively rude to or just ignore a co-author on fics I've done with friends more than once though, weirdly enough, which I actually find a lot more anger-inducing than hate directed at me is.

10) Do you write smut? If so what kind?

....all of the smut 😂 mostly slash, lots of kink, some porn with feelings and some porn with plot and some where the porn IS the plot. And a whole lot of self indulgent PWP 😏

11) Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Yep I've been really obviously ripped off before and it's a real shitty feeling

12) Have you ever had a fic translated?

Yeah! Just once I think, but it was pretty neat to be asked 😄

13) Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Yup! Several times with a few different people, it was a lot of fun.

14) What's your all time favorite ship?

Don't really have one? I ship too many ships across too many fandoms to pick One Favourite For All Time 🙈 Plus, I mean... interests shift and I don't want to wind up making myself feel guilty for that if it does happen to even my favourite ships. I've seen people stubbornly holding onto a ship they don't seem to be all that interested in anymore, just because their whole fandom identity is wrapped up in it. It... really doesn't look like it'd be a fun time 😬

15) What's a WIP that you want to finish but don't think you ever will?

There's quite a few, some partially published and some still in my fic writing folders, but I hesitate to actually say "I don't think I'll ever finish This One" because sometimes I do randomly come back to shit out of the blue, or because a re-watch/-play/-read rekindles the interest in it again. Probably not likely in a lot of cases, but... squirrel-brain does what squirrel-brain wants to do 😂

16) What are your writing strengths?

Sex scenes 😎 and short fic of all flavours

17) What are your writing weaknesses?

Sometimes my overly long sentences are good, but sometimes they do just unnecessarily make the paragraph harder to read. I also have a tendency to stray to far into Over-Description territory of characters' physical states and actions.

18) What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

It can be effective and immersive, but only if it doesn't leave people confused and having to jump up or down to translation notes at the start or end. My favourite use of other languages in dialogue is to use it only for single words that are evident or explained in context, or for terms of endearment where it's not necessary to know the exact meaning of it (especially when that stuff is part of canon anyway, like the smattering of Italian used in Assassin's Creed, or Radek cursing in Czech)

If it's like full sentences, I just write the line in english in italics, along with something like "X replied in [language]" to signal it's happening.

19) What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Midsomer Murders 😊

20) What's your favorite fic you've written?

It changes, really... I guess currently it's probably Inflection Point just cause I'm still really proud of myself for actually doing it 😄

I also feel like I've been tagging people a lot lately, so I'll do like frank did and say Consider yourself tagged if you wish you were ;D

#tag games #long post #chaos babbles #writing #multifandom #i'm a little bit high rn so if any of this makes no sense i apologize 😂

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

Text

20 years a blogger

It's been twenty years, to the day, since I published my first blog-post.

I'm a blogger.

Blogging - publicly breaking down the things that seem significant, then synthesizing them in longer pieces - is the defining activity of my days.

https://boingboing.net/2001/01/13/hey-mark-made-me-a.html

Over the years, I've been lauded, threatened, sued (more than once). I've met many people who read my work and have made connections with many more whose work I wrote about. Combing through my old posts every morning is a journey through my intellectual development.

It's been almost exactly a year I left Boing Boing, after 19 years. It wasn't planned, and it wasn't fun, but it was definitely time. I still own a chunk of the business and wish them well. But after 19 years, it was time for a change.

A few weeks after I quit Boing Boing, I started a solo project. It's called Pluralistic: it's a blog that is published simultaneously on Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr, a newsletter and the web. It's got no tracking or ads. Here's the very first edition:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/

I don't often do "process posts" but this merits it. Here's how I built Pluralistic and here's how it works today, after nearly a year.

I get up at 5AM and make coffee. Then I sit down on the sofa and open a huge tab-group, and scroll through my RSS feeds using Newsblur.

I spend the next 1-2 hours winnowing through all the stuff that seems important. I have a chronic pain problem and I really shouldn't sit on the sofa for more than 10 minutes, so I use a timer and get up every 10 minutes and do one minute of physio.

After a couple hours, I'm left with 3-4 tabs that I want to write articles about that day. When I started writing Pluralistic, I had a text file on my desktop with some blank HTML I'd tinkered with to generate a layout; now I have an XML file (more on that later).

First I go through these tabs and think up metadata tags I want to use for each; I type these into the template using my text-editor (gedit), like this:

<xtags>

process, blogging, pluralistic, recursion, navel-gazing

</xtags>

Each post has its own little template. It needs an anchor tag (for this post, that's "hfbd"), a title ("20 years a blogger") and a slug ("Reflections on a lifetime of reflecting"). I fill these in for each post.

Then I come up with a graphic for each post: I've got a giant folder of public domain clip-art, and I'm good at using all the search tools for open-licensed art: the Library of Congress, Wikimedia, Creative Commons, Flickr Commons, and, ofc, Google Image Search.

I am neither an artist nor a shooper, but I've been editing clip art since I created pixel-art versions of the Frankie Goes to Hollywood glyphs using Bannermaker for the Apple //c in 1985 and printed them out on enough fan-fold paper to form a border around my bedroom.

As I create the graphics, I pre-compose Creative Commons attribution strings to go in the post; there's two versions, one for the blog/newsletter and one for Mastodon/Twitter/Tumblr. I compose these manually.

Here's a recent one:

Blog/Newsletter:

(<i>Image: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:QAnon_in_red_shirt_(48555421111).jpg">Marc Nozell</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en">CC BY</a>, modified</i>)

Twitter/Masto/Tumblr:

Image: Marc Nozell (modified)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:QAnon_in_red_shirt_(48555421111).jpg

CC BY

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

This is purely manual work, but I've been composing these CC attribution strings since CC launched in 2003, and they're just muscle-memory now. Reflex.

These attribution strings, as well as anything else I'll need to go from Twitter to the web (for example, the names of people whose Twitter handles I use in posts, or images I drop in, go into the text file). Here's how the post looks at this point in the composition.

<hr>

<h1>20 years a blogger</h1><xtagline>Reflections on a lifetime of reflecting.</xtagline>

See that <img> tag in there for frnklogo.jpg? I snuck that in while I was composing this in Twitter. When I locate an image on the web I want to use in a post, I save it to a dir on my desktop that syncs every 60 seconds to the /images/ dir on my webserver.

As I save it, I copy the filename to my clipboard, flip over to gedit, and type in the <img> tag, pasting the filename. I've typed <img src="https://craphound.com/images/ CTRL-V"> tens of thousands of times - muscle memory.

Once the thread is complete, I copy each tweet back into gedit, tabbing back and forth, replacing Twitter handles and hashtags with non-Twitter versions, changing the ALL CAPS EMPHASIS to the extra-character-consuming *asterisk-bracketed emphasis*.

My composition is greatly aided both 20 years' worth of mnemonic slurry of semi-remembered posts and the ability to search memex.craphound.com (the site where I've mirrored all my Boing Boing posts) easily.

A huge, searchable database of decades of thoughts really simplifies the process of synthesis.

Next I port the posts to other media. I copy the headline and paste it into a new Tumblr compose tab, then import the image and tag the post "pluralistic."

Then I paste the text of the post into Tumblr and manually select, cut, and re-paste every URL in the post (because Tumblr's automatic URL-to-clickable-link tool's been broken for 10+ months).

Next I past the whole post into a Mastodon compose field. Working by trial and error, I cut it down to <500 characters, breaking at a para-break and putting the rest on my clipboard. I post, reply, and add the next item in the thread until it's all done.

*Then* I hit publish on my Twitter thread. Composing in Twitter is the most unforgiving medium I've ever worked in. You have to keep each stanza below 280 chars. You can't save a thread as a draft, so as you edit it, you have to pray your browser doesn't crash.

And once you hit publish, you can't edit it. Forever. So you want to publish Twitter threads LAST, because the process of mirroring them to Tumblr and Mastodon reveals typos and mistakes (but there's no way to save the thread while you work!).

Now I create a draft Wordpress post on pluralistic.net, and create a custom slug for the page (today's is "two-decades"). Saving the draft generates the URL for the page, which I add to the XML file.

Once all the day's posts are done, I make sure to credit all my sources in another part of that master XML file, and then I flip to the command line and run a bunch of python scripts that do MAGIC: formatting the master file as a newsletter, a blog post, and a master thread.

Those python scripts saved my ASS. For the first two months of Pluralistic, i did all the reformatting by hand. It was a lot of search-replace (I used a checklist) and I ALWAYS screwed it up and had to debug, sometimes taking hours.

Then, out of the blue, a reader - Loren Kohnfelder - wrote to me to point out bugs in the site's RSS. He offered to help with text automation and we embarked on a month of intensive back-and-forth as he wrote a custom suite for me.

Those programs take my XML file and spit out all the files I need to publish my site, newsletter and master thread (which I pin to my profile). They've saved me more time than I can say. I probably couldn't kept this up without Loren's generous help (thank you, Loren!).

I open up the output from the scripts in gedit. I paste the blog post into the Wordpress draft and copy-paste the metadata tags into WP's "tags" field. I preview the post, tweak as necessary, and publish.

(And now I write this, I realize I forgot to mention that while I'm doing the graphics, I also create a square header image that makes a grid-collage out of the day's post images, using the Gimp's "alignment" tool)

(because I'm composing this in Twitter, it would be a LOT of work to insert that information further up in the post, where it would make sense to have it - see what I mean about an unforgiving medium?)

(While I'm on the subject: putting the "add tweet to thread" and "publish the whole thread" buttons next to each other is a cruel joke that has caused me to repeatedly publish before I was done, and deleting a thread after you publish it is a nightmare)

Now I paste the newsletter file into a new mail message, address it to my Mailman server, and create a custom subject for the day, send it, open the Mailman admin interface in a browser, and approve the message.

Now it's time to create that anthology post you can see pinned to my Mastodon and Twitter accounts. Loren's script uses a template to produce all the tweets for the day, but it's not easy to get that pre-written thread into Twitter and Mastodon.

Part of the problem is that each day's Twitter master thread has a tweet with a link to the day's Mastodon master thread ("Are you trying to wean yourself off Big Tech? Follow these threads on the #fediverse at @[email protected]. Here's today's edition: LINK").

So the first order of business is to create the Mastodon thread, pin it, copy the link to it, and paste it into the template for the Twitter thread, then create and pin the Twitter thread.

Now it's time to get ready for tomorrow. I open up the master XML template file and overwrite my daily working file with its contents. I edit the file's header with tomorrow's date, trim away any "Upcoming appearances" that have gone by, etc.

Then I compose tomorrow's retrospective links. I open tabs for this day a year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and (now) 20 years ago:

http://memex.craphound.com/2020/01/14

http://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/14

http://memex.craphound.com/2011/01/14

http://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/14

http://memex.craphound.com/2001/01/14

I go through each day, and open anything I want to republish in its own tab, then open the OP link in the next tab (finding it in the @internetarchive if necessary). Then I copy my original headline and the link to the article into tomorrow's XML file, like so:

#10yrsago Disney World’s awful Tiki Room catches fire <a href="https://thedisneyblog.com/2011/01/12/fire-reported-at-magic-kingdom-tiki-room/">https://thedisneyblog.com/2011/01/12/fire-reported-at-magic-kingdom-tiki-room/</a>

And NOW my day is done.

So, why do I do all this?

First and foremost, I do it for ME. The memex I've created by thinking about and then describing every interesting thing I've encountered is hugely important for how I understand the world. It's the raw material of every novel, article, story and speech I write.

And I do it for the causes I believe in. There's stuff in this world I want to change for the better. Explaining what I think is wrong, and how it can be improved, is the best way I know for nudging it in a direction I want to see it move.

The more people I reach, the more it moves.

When I left Boing Boing, I lost access to a freestanding way of communicating. Though I had popular Twitter and Tumblr accounts, they are at the mercy of giant companies with itchy banhammers and arbitrary moderation policies.

I'd long been a fan of the POSSE - Post Own Site, Share Everywhere - ethic, the idea that your work lives on platforms you control, but that it travels to meet your readers wherever they are.

Pluralistic posts start out as Twitter threads because that's the most constrained medium I work in, but their permalinks (each with multiple hidden messages in their slugs) are anchored to a server I control.

When my threads get popular, I make a point of appending the pluralistic.net permalink to them.

When I started blogging, 20 years ago, blogger.com had few amenities. None of the familiar utilities of today's media came with the package.

Back then, I'd manually create my headlines with <h2> tags. I'd manually create discussion links for each post on Quicktopic. I'd manually paste each post into a Yahoo Groups email. All the guff I do today to publish Pluralistic is, in some way, nothing new.

20 years in, blogging is still a curious mix of both technical, literary and graphic bodgery, with each day's work demanding the kind of technical minutuae we were told would disappear with WYSIWYG desktop publishing.

I grew up in the back-rooms of print shops where my dad and his friends published radical newspapers, laying out editions with a razor-blade and rubber cement on a light table. Today, I spend hours slicing up ASCII with a cursor.

I go through my old posts every day. I know that much - most? - of them are not for the ages. But some of them are good. Some, I think, are great. They define who I am. They're my outboard brain.

#pluralistic

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supernaturallyobsessedchic · 3 years

Text

What I’ve Done

Dean x Reader

Warnings: It’s a dark-ish one, angst, language, spn level gore, spn 15x19 spoilers, fluffy end

Summary: It’s the final showdown, Sam, Dean, Jack and the reader against Chuck. But Chuck somehow gets to the reader controlling her every move.

Masterlist

DTRH Masterlist

Mobile Masterlist

a/n: Italics is the reader.

a/n #2: This has been bugging me for a few days, I wrote this in like, 2 days. Feedback is much appreciated.

“Y/N?” Dean asked.

Sam, Dean and Y/N were face to face with Chuck.

Her face was totally blank and emotionless.

“Three versus one, don’t you guys think that’s a bit unfair.” Chuck says in an evil tone. “How ‘bout I take Y/N on my side and make the odds fair.” He gestures y/n to join his side.

She walked over to Chuck’s side. Dean looking offended and hurt.

“Dean, it’s mind control. Look at Y/N.” Sam says.

“Her eyes have a red color to them. Sam, I can’t hurt her.”

“Which is why I picked her. I knew you wouldn’t hurt her; she wouldn’t hurt you. I’ll love the outcome of this story.” Chuck says, looking confident once again. “Y/N, get him.”

Her eyes flashed red; her sights set on Dean.

“Y/N, I know you’re in there, fight him.” Dean tried to get to her as he backed away from her as she advanced him.

She doesn’t respond.

Dean! Please get away from me!

“Y/N, Please!” He begged. Turning to run in the forest to try to lose her.

“Now, Sam. Let’s have some fun.” Chuck says eyeing Sam.

She was still fairly close to Dean as he tried to give her the slip in the forest.

“Please, baby, please.” Dean began to panic. Unsure of what to do.

But she caught up. Grabbing a fist full of his shirt and coat. Landing a hard punch to his face. Breaking the skin, cutting his cheek immediately from the force.

“Y/N, Please I know you’re in there. I know how strong you are. Fight him, he’s got nothing on you.” Dean tried again.

I’m trying Dean, it’s God after all. Now, fight back and get away from me!

But she kept punching him.

Dean’s face now swollen, a black eye, split lip and cheek as he struggled to breathe.

“Y/N, I love you baby. I know you must be fighting hard.”

Dean, he’s too strong, you have to kill me. Fight back. SOMETHING!

“But I can’t live with hurting you,” he says, as if he heard her plea.

“I love you too damn much sweetheart.”

Dean, please!

Y/N began to hesitate, she was winning.

“Y/N?” Dean questioned.

“Dean, please get away from me.” Y/N forced out, fighting Chuck.

“You’re almost out of it baby, keep fighting.” Dean urged.

“I have no control over my body Dean,” Y/N says as her hand that had his shirt and coat moved to his shoulder.

“I know it must be hard baby, I’ve seen you fight some tough things. Me included you can fight anything.” Dean continued.

“Y/N, Fight him!” Dean shouted.

She felt Chuck’s power taking hold. She grunted and groaned in the pain it took to fight him.

“Finish him!” Chuck yelled from the edge of the forest.

The red flashed over her eyes again, and her free hand drove itself through his chest, his heart in hand.

NO!

She pulled her hand from Dean’s chest, dropping his heart to his side. Dean fell over with a thud on the forest ground.

“NO!” Y/N Shouted with such force. She forced Chuck out.

“This is for Dean, you son of a bitch.” Jack says.

Jack brings his hands to Chuck, drawing his power from him. Making Jack a new God.

“Dean.” Y/N choked as she crawled to him.

He laid lifeless on his side in a pool of his own blood.

“Dean, I’m so sorry.” She cried.

Sobs tore through her as she let out a pained cry. Falling to her knees.

Jack ran over to Dean and Y/N, Sam in toe.

“Jack, can you---”

“I’m way ahead of you Sam.”

And with a snap of his fingers, Dean takes in a breath of air. His chest wound healed. As if she didn’t just rip his heart out.

On her knees next to Dean, she has her face in her hands crying fiercely.

Dean, without saying anything, brings her to his arms holding her close in his embrace.

Despite her trembling in his hold, he kept calm for her sake.

“It’s okay sweetheart, I’m right here.” He soothed in her ear, over and over again.

She laid her head down to sleep that night. But is plagued by the images from her fight with Chuck she can’t forget.

“I love you sweetheart.” She heard Dean whisper.

She remembered the feeling of her hand driving through his chest and grabbing his heart. She remembered all of it.

She knew it was a nightmare, when Dean was standing before her, a blood red blotch on his shirt where his heart was ripped out. With an apologetic smile on his face, holding his hand out for her to hold.

She tearfully shook her head before she fell to her knees to cry.

She shot awake clutching her blanket, trying to shake her nightmare.

I have to. She thought. As she got up out of bed and out of her room. She made her way to Dean’s room.

She quietly opened his door, slowly entering.

She can see his sleeping form in the dark room, the only light coming from the hallway.

Miracle’s head perked up as she woke him up, but doesn’t bark or make any noise, sensing she’s upset.

Tears began to well up in her eyes.

He’s okay. She thought with a sigh of relief.

And she sniffled.

Dean stirred, feeling someone in his room. And hearing a sniffle behind him.

He turns to sit up and face her.

“Y/N?” He asks, confused yet concerned. “What’s up, are you okay?”

“Dean,” she says, holding back cries.

He gets up out of bed, concerned for her.

“Sweetheart, what’s wrong, what’s got you crying?” he asked. As he got to her, hands on her shoulders.

She stood at chest height to the eldest Winchester, she flinched at her minds eye tricking her in seeing a blood red blotch on the chest of his shirt. She turns her head away.

“Talk to me sweetie, what’s got you upset?”

“Nightmare.” She breathed.

“Lets hang out for minute.” Dean suggests.

He walks her out of his room and to the Dean Cave. Thanks to Mrs. Butters, the TV is fixed and fully functional.

He knows that watching some movies, like comedy’s, cartoons, would help take her mind off of bad hunts. And after the events at the lake with Chuck, he knew what her nightmare was about without even having to ask her.

He pops in one of his personal favorites, Caddyshack.

Y/N and Dean sat side by side on the couch, but that only lasted for one millisecond. Once Dean sat down after popping the movie in, he takes Y/N by the arm and guides her to lay at his side for a little cuddling comfort.

It didn’t take long for the walls to break at his embrace.

“It’s okay baby, I’m right here. Nothing’s going to hurt your or me, anymore.” He soothes.

One movie turned into three. She calmed down after the first movie, crying on and off during Caddyshack. She would move off of Dean some so he could change the movie.

During, Bounty Hunter, he felt her relax against him and her breathing had evened out and slowed down some. He looked down and seen she fallen asleep against him.

He heard a pair of footsteps enter the Dean Cave.

“Dean.” Sam whispers.

“Hey Sammy, what time is it?” Dean asked, wondering why Sam’s up so early.

“It’s after 5 in the morning. Have you two been up all night?”

“Not really, she had a bad nightmare that had her crying. Thought I’d sit up with her watching some movies.”

“You two are perfect for each other, how you guys can keep each other in check.”

“I wouldn’t want to mess this up.”

“You wouldn’t Dean, if anything, it’d be making it stronger and better.”

“I suppose.”

“Is she asleep?” Sam asked.

“She is.”

Sam doesn’t say anything, he hurries to Dean’s room. Knowing the type of blanket that Dean has that Sam caught her cuddled in after a bad hunt that had Dean in the hospital. She slept in her room but with this blanket of Dean’s.

He came back to the Dean cave, draping it across the two on the couch.

“It may not be comfortable, but you need sleep Dean.” Sam suggests.

“I’m sure I’ll crash here in a few.” Dean says. He yawns not long after admitting he was tired.

He let his eyes fall closed, and he fell asleep holding his girl.

Sam only shook his head with a smile at Dean. He left them be, but Miracle joined them by sleep by the couch next to Dean.

FEEDBACK IS FUEL! Let me know what you thought, Like, reblog or send an ask what you thought, if you want to be added to a tag list. Anything. :3

Dean Girls:

@pandazombie69, @luci-in-trenchcoats, @supernatural-jackles, @becs-bunker, @akshi8278, @jayankles, @jeaniespiehs20

Copying and reposting someone else’s content is plagiarism and illegal. This work is property of supernaturallyobsessedchic. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. These works contain material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of these works may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher. An electronic reference link to the original posted work may be provided for purposes of promotion or assistance of publication by the readers discretion, if proper credits are given to the author in the re-post. 1/29/2021

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marvellouslymadmim · 3 years

Note

Hey! Aspiring fanfic writer here; I was wondering if you could talk a bit about your writing/editing process and how long it all takes.

Thanks!

Welp, roughly the same extremely long amount of time it takes to actually answer an ask, tbh 🙃

So...I only know how my brain works, and I can only tell you what works for me might not work for you, and that's OK. I'm breaking into two separate bits, because I almost never do writing and editing at the same time.

And as far as a timeline, honestly it just depends. On life factors, what my hormones are doing at the time (jfc like the week before my period, I have zero creativity, motivation, or attention span), if I'm having trouble with a particular scene, if I'm getting consistent positive feedback (yes, I can totally admit that I write faster when I know a particular reviewer is following along with every update), etc.

WRITING:

First, you gotta just...be fixated, I guess. Particularly if it's an AU, I sit with it for a long time before I ever write a word. I go over scenes, think about how the world changes, what stays the same, what *has* to stay the same to keep the characters true to their canon personalities. I sit with the characters for a long time, too--not just the main characters, but the supporting cast, too. In order to predict someone's future, you have to know their past. Most of our present actions are actually reactions to past events, when you think about it. The better you know your version of the character, the easier every other aspect of writing will be. I don't know how it is for other people, but I don't ever "feel" like I'm writing. I feel like I'm "witnessing", and the characters are simply doing whatever they wish. (***this is gonna be a thing during the editing process, too, so hang on to that)

Then once I have a general idea, I choose a title. Generally, I do not even start a word document until I have a proper title to put on it. The title is part of the theme and aesthetic to me, and it grounds me in the overall arc.

Once that's done, it's time for outlining. I generally wait until I feel this weird almost tingling in my left arm (weirder still bc I'm right handed) and I'm practically vibrating with a need to WRITE THIS STORY NOW. Then I put on some Bear McCreary (honestly, any videogame soundtrack will do, as they are literally designed to help you maintain focus and keep pace) and fucking go to town. For me, it helps to do this with pen and paper, so that I can go back up and squiggle little notes in the margin, rearrange the order, etc, far faster than I could on a computer.

Important note: the outline is not the end-all be-all. Some things don't make it to the final print. Some minor storylines get tossed or characters simply...take a different path than I expect. I will continue re-writing and updating the outline as I go along. On average, I usually have 5-8 outlines per story, and they're often 3-10 pages long. I also have a posted outline, which is a log of all the scenes that did make it to the final product.

Then, it's the actual writing, at long last. I have found that I write best at the start of my day, before the noise and static of daily life comes in. So I wake up around 5am and spend 90minutes writing before beginning my workday routine. I have the Word app on my phone and may continue adding bits in throughout the day at work, if I get a moment. However, after 5pm my brain is usually fried and no more creativity happens. On weekends, I try to have one morning where I "sleep in" til 6am, and then write until at least 10am, sometimes 2pm, if I can get away with it.

The hardest part still is knowing when to transition and when to skip to the next chapter/scene/whatever. This is like...zero percent helpful, but I liken it to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography: "I know it when I see it." It may seem like a scene is circling, and sometimes it means you gotta leave the room a bit earlier bc the scene has already served its purpose. Other times, it means ya gotta stay with it a bit longer, because there's something the character is trying to say. Give them patience, and give yourself patience, too. Explore the scene and its dynamics. You won't know til you know and even then, sometimes you won't be entirely sure. That's ok, too. Part of the process. Remember editing will happen and you can decide then (hell, you can literally re-edit after it's been published, I've done that before too and added a note on the next chapter for any readers who might have read the first version 🤷🏻‍♀️ not ideal but still functional).

EDITING:

I do simple edits (spelling, grammar, etc) just about every morning as I reread what I wrote the day before, which is a refresher course for the day's writing session. But big "real" editing generally doesn't happen until right before posting.

Now, here's the ***issue from writing: sometimes, something just "doesn't work" in a scene. Again, you'll know it when you see it. The words a character is saying feels clunky. The pacing feels off. Something just...ain't right. More often than not, it means either I haven't truly sat with a character long enough to know their true motivations/backstory, or I am not giving characters the proper time/space/impediment to make the actions or say the things they're currently making/saying. I'm trying to force the flow, rather than letting it ebb and breathe when it needs to.

Absolute ProTip: You spent HOURS writing this scene. It's got some REALLY GOOD moments and lines in it. It doesn't work but you can't just delete it. It's your LIFE. I struggle with this A LOT, and I have found a solution: create a second "outtakes" document to cut and paste those scenes into. Sometimes I still keep moments or bits of dialog. Sometimes I later use bits in a later scene. Sometimes I never look at it again but I still feel secure in knowing that if I wanted to go back and use the original scene instead, I totally can. I don't think I've actually ever gone back to the original, tbh, but it reduced my anxiety about deleting the scene and starting over.

So back to the scene that doesn't work. I take it apart, figure out *at what exact point* it stops working, then work back up a few lines to see where the shift actually begins. More often than not, it's because I'm having characters express their feelings in ways they actually wouldn't. (people very very very rarely actually say what they're thinking/feeling, and you have to relay it in other ways). So I have to keep the internal monologue of what they're actually feeling/thinking, while figuring out how that actually translates via tone, body language, and what they do and don't say.

The "something ain't working stage" can take LITERAL WEEKS. I sometimes have to walk away for awhile, or tackle it only on days when I know I have hours upon hours to truly work on it. I keep circling back around, and eventually, the knot works itself out. Persistence, and insistence that "good enough" isn't actually good enough, are key. (this is why you have to fixated on the story you want to tell--because some days, it's going to take every ounce of that obsession to keep you going and keep you on the track of telling the story you wanted to tell, rather than settling or switching to an easier tack)

Sometimes, editing is a breeze. I don't change much, I may go a little more into the character's inner world here or there. Once you've been doing this for awhile, you'll just know when a story hits all its marks--and you'll also know when it's not, when it could be more or do more, and you can figure out how to get it there. There isn't a precise formula for it, it's more like cooking without an actual recipe to follow--a dash here, a bit there, you'll know it when you taste it.

And I'll leave you with this unsolicited bit: just write. Write often, write about everything, write what makes YOU passionate and happy, and absolutely write for yourself. Edit the fuck out of it, if you need to. Get a beta reader, if you need to. Get someone to just bounce ideas off, if you need to. And don't post it until you're truly ready and it's something you genuinely want to share. If someone gives constructive criticism, take in on the chin and move on (keep the notes, if you think they're valid, and toss em if you don't--you'll never be everyone's style of writer, so know that sometimes, people just won't be the target audience). Know that you'll grow and you'll learn and you'll find your own voice and like any skill, you'll develop a second nature about it--all those parts where I say "you'll know it when you see it" or "you'll feel it" absolutely come from spending a literal lifetime (28 years) writing stories, and thirteen years of writing fanfic in particular. It's ok if you don't see it or feel it right away. It takes practice. And you will have an audience at every skill level, no matter what (finding that audience? different story altogether...).

All totaled, this process can take anywhere from 3months to over a year. Stories are like children, I've found: they each develop at their own pace, and some may need more time and assistance than others. But they're still pretty wonderful. (except the bratty stories. they're the worst 🙄)

#thanks anon!#asks #writing asks #writing reference #i guess?#i hope it helps!!#fic writing

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1dcraftawards · 4 years

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October Author of the Month...

Drumroll please... our author of the month for October ended in a tie between three wonderfully talented authors!

@bopbopstyles @oh-honey-styles @stylishmuser

Congratulations to all three of these absolutely amazing girls! Check out our interviews with each of them below!

Author of the Month interview with @bopbopstyles !

Did you start writing fanfiction for One Direction, or was there another fandom that you wrote fanfiction for before this? The only fanfiction I’ve ever written has been 1D! I wrote Liam back in the day (oof) but now I’m a Harry girl - but I’ve been considering doing Niall at some point!

How old were you when you started writing fanfiction? I think I wrote some bits of fics back when I was probably 13 or so, but I wouldn’t really say I *wrote* fanfic at that time. I only started writing fanfic in January of this year, but started doing it a lot this summer.

What’s been your favorite fic that you’ve written to work on so far?100000% Rose Colored Glasses. I write historical fiction outside of my fanfic writing life, so RCG was the combination of all the things I love: history, Peaky Blinders, boxer!Harry, and as my agent calls them “cinnamon roll boys”.

Is there a fic that you really wanted to write, but you just never did? I have this idea for a time travel fic but haven’t decided if I want to take that idea and use it for a non-fanfic story or not yet, so I haven’t written it. It would definitely be a similar vein to RCG if I did write it though!

What’s your favorite trope to write? FRATBOY HARRY HOLDS MY HEART! (If you couldn’t tell by my multiple fratboy/college!harry fics lol) Also, friends to lovers. The pining. The character development. Ugh. I LOVE.

What’s your ideal space to write in? I can kind of write anywhere, but lately I’ve been writing the best in the evening on either my couch or at my desk! Just someplace that’s comfy and I can completely focus is the main thing. I’m also a bit coffee shop writer (but not when doing smut!!!!!!!)

What inspires you to write? Everything. Music is probably the biggest one, second would be television and movies. I love taking something creative someone else has done and twisting and reinventing it. But also things I see, people I know, my own experiences, art -- everything. (Bad For Me is literally based on my best friend, for example.)

Do you typically like to listen to music when you write? If so, what do you listen to? ALWAYS. I’m genuinely always listening to music, and it influences my mood and my writing, so it’ll change depending on the project and the scene. I’ve had playlists for some of my work, but a lot of times it’ll be some moody or lovey playlists I have, other times I’ll just listen to an album I’m loving on repeat. Completely depends! For Elevated Surfaces, for example, it was mostly written to frat party music because that’s where the story was set. You can check out my Spotify here if you want to see some of what I listen to!

Do you have any plans for any future fic ideas you’d like to pursue?I’ve been dying to write my Jane Austen series but haven’t gotten the time yet! It’ll take a while, so I’ve been putting it off, but I reaaalllyyyy want to do it at some point. There’s a couple others, but that’s one I really want to do at some point.

Do you have any advice for other writers in the fandom? Read, read, READ. That’s my advice for writers in general. Read widely (across genres, age groups, etc) and read critically! A lot of what I learned about how to write has come from analyzing books I read. I used to review books, actually, and it has definitely helped form how I write. I think for fan fiction specifically, though, I think a lot of people have a tendency to struggle with feeling pressured to write or rushed or judged for what they write. It’s definitely the result of the way we consume fan fiction, but I also think that it’s helpful to think about why you’re writing. For me personally, I write because it just genuinely brings me immense amounts of joy and I like sharing that with people. Writing for yourself takes a lot of the pressure off, I’ve found. It’s when you start writing for others that it can turn into a more difficult place. So: try to write for yourself first, before others!

How long does it normally take you, idea to posting, to post a fic?This completely depends on the fic! Once I get an idea I can write it pretty quickly, so I can churn out content quickly if I have the time. However, my pieces are long (most are in the 15-30k mark) which usually will take me a few days. Usually I’d say somewhere in the ballpark of like 10-20 hours total per one shot, but completely depends. Multi-chapter definitely take longer!Right now, for example, I haven’t written fanfiction in two weeks because I’m working on other projects. It really is dependent on what else I have going on in my life, because I also work full-time now, and so my posting has definitely declined in the past two months.

Is there a schedule you follow in terms of when you write? Or are you more impulsive and just write where and when you can? 100% impulsive, but mostly I write in the evenings and on weekends (aka when I’m not working). But no specific schedule -- I think if I schedule it then it takes some of the fun out of it.

What is one thing you wish you would’ve known before you started writing? How much FUN it is! I genuinely adore writing fanfiction and have made so many amazing friends through it. I wish I’d started earlier, in some ways.

What do you prefer writing, multi-chaptered fics or one shots? One shots for SURE. I don’t really plan on doing multi-chaptered again for a while, actually. Partly because it’s just more work, but also because it prolongs the wait for people to read it, and part of why I love fanfiction is the immediate gratification you get from it.

What was your favorite scene to write in “The Only Exception”?OOOOOH. I loved the early scenes when they were still getting to know one another. I’d say probably the scene from Harry’s release party and their emotional conversation after (from Ch.3) were really fun to write because they were so vulnerable. Also their fights. LOVED writing their fights. The Dunkirk premiere from Ch.3 and 4? One of my favorites. So probably the entirety of Ch. 3, I guess!

What is one moment from “Rose Colored Glasses” that you never got to write but wanted to? I struggled SO MUCH with their reunion scene. I re-wrote it like twice and played with a couple of different ways it was going to go, before settling on the final result. I had this one concept, though, where Cicely was going to ride her horse into Birmingham and Harry was going to be called to the stables to pick her up, and Cicely was going to just be so happy and excited to see him and Harry would be so overwhelmed he wouldn’t care about what his friends saw and would just be so tender with her.

What scenes/scenarios are most fun for you to write? I adore writing pining. The pining in Good Together is probably my favorite I’ve done -- the photo shoot scene? *collapses* I also love banter, which was one of the reasons Behind the Bar will always hold a special place in my heart.

Some readers are wary of leaving feedback because they're unsure how the writer will take it, how do you personally like to receive feedback? Do you want to be critiqued, or would you like to just know if they did or didn't enjoy what they've read? Feedback is literally what I thrive on. I’m in constant need of validation, to be honest, so please tell me when you like what I write! I love it! As far as types of feedback, I think that for my fanfiction, I’m not really posting it to get critiqued. Personally, it doesn’t help my writing in any way, because I’m writing for myself more than for others -- their enjoyment is just an additional plus. So I take critiques in kind of an “okay?” sort of way. It just doesn’t really affect me. I think the other thing about critiques (sorry I’m going off on this question lol) is that you don’t have to take them. I have people in my life whose opinions I trust and those are the people I want to critique my writing. The one caveat here is if my writing is offensive in any way. In that case, I want to be told so that I can fix it, learn from it, and make my future writing better. I will also say that I think part of it is that my fanfiction isn’t really the writing I’m the proudest of. I write outside of fanfiction, have an agent, etc. and so that part of my life is definitely what I care more about. For those projects, I desperately seek critiques, but from people whose opinions I trust!

Is writing a hobby or do you have aspirations of writing professionally outside of fanfiction? Writing professionally is the dream for me! My agent and I put my last project on submission but it wasn’t picked up, so I’m working on something new right now. Hopefully that will end up getting published, but we’ll see!

And finally, What's your purpose for writing? What do you hope to accomplish? I hope that my writing brings people joy and helps them learn something, whether that be about themselves or the world. Books are what helped me learn about the world and have brought me such happiness over the years, so I hope that mine can do the same.

Author of the Month interview with @oh-honey-styles !

Did you start writing fanfiction for One Direction, or was there another fandom that you wrote fanfiction for before this? Just for Harry! He’s that obnoxiously endearing, isn’t he?

How old were you when you started writing fanfiction?Okay okay, I guess I wrote something that resembled fanfiction (non-Harry) when I was fifteen or sixteen. That was all extremely idealistic cringy teenage angst that will live under a rock for eternity. But as far as Harry fanfiction, it was about a year ago when I started ‘Met Your Match’.

What’s been your favorite fic you’ve written to work on so far? My personal favorite is ‘January in Japan’. It was the first time I really dreamt up and developed my OFCs. Between Harry’s healing from heartbreak storyline, as well as Stella’s strong, feisty personality, all mixed together against the backdrop of Japan. The entire vibe was, and still is, so special to me. Plus, Japan!H is something else - peak boyfriend material.

Is there a fic that you really wanted to write, but you just never did?I mean, sure, there are always ideas floating around. But nothing that’s really kept nagging at me.

What’s your favorite trope to write? Fluffy mutual pining between strangers/friends to lovers with a tiny dash of angst.

What’s your ideal space to write in? I don’t really have an ideal space! But I will say, I’ve found that writing tends to really flow during AM hours. I’ve written most of my stories laying in bed, in the dark, between the hours of midnight and 4AM.

What inspires you to write? That bloke Harry Styles is the most endearing menace, so he’s generally my number one inspiration. But I also have a few bad ass women that inspire me more than they’ll ever know. They are my ride-or-die encouragement whose writing and brilliant ideas continuously motivate me to be a better writer.

Do you typically like to listen to music when you write? If so, what do you listen to?This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I don’t! I do have artists/songs that inspire my stories (for example, The Sugarhill Gang for ‘Hazy’ and ‘Rise Up’ by Andra Day for ‘Black & Blue’). But for the most part, I love silence while writing.

Do you have any plans for any future fic ideas you’d like to pursue?At the moment I’m only focused on ‘Collide’. However, it really doesn’t take long for the bug to bite!

Do you have any advice for other writers in the fandom?Well, since I started writing, I’ve been extremely lucky to have amazing advice poured into me by some of the most phenomenal writers in the fandom. So I guess one thing I would pass along is that writing fic is meant to be fun! Continue to write as long as you’re truly, truly loving it. If you’re not having fun writing or enjoying the process, step away and circle back during another season in life. When fic becomes a stress or a burden, it’s time to step away.

What is your writing process like?Honestly? (insert cringe face) It’s a hot mess. I don’t typically do outlines and if I do, they’re always changing. I usually write raw dialogue first and then add in the rest. Sometimes I’ll write a scene out from beginning to end, but I’m generally filling in the gaps. I always keep a doc open on my phone for ideas that pop into my head throughout the day (a conversation or a visual). And then once a scene is completed, I send it off to my betas and they’re the ones who let me know if I’m completely off my rocker or not.

Is there a schedule you follow in terms of when you write? Or are you more impulsive and just write where and when you can?100% impulsive. I write and post when inspiration hits and when life allows it.

What is one thing you wish you would’ve known before you started writing? That once you start, you can’t stop. The writing bug is fucking relentless.

What do you prefer writing, multi-chaptered fics or one shots?All of the above! Multi-chapter fics are nice, having the freedom to really develop your characters as well as elaborate on a concept. But they’re definitely exhausting. And one-shots are such a good way to bust out an idea with no strings attached. I really enjoy writing both.

What has been your favorite scene to write so far in “Collide”?‘The Wedding’ has been my favorite scene in ‘Collide’ so far. I absolutely adored writing the initial nervous attraction between Harry and Franki. It’s really the initial point in the story where they start to realize that there may actually be deeper feelings there on both sides. Plus, who doesn’t love a nervous, flirty Harry?

What is one moment from “Met Your Match” that you never got to write but want to?Oh wow. ‘Met Your Match’ rounded out pretty well, but I guess I had one moment in mind that I never wrote. It was basically a scene where Harry and Kate are in LA on their way to a BBQ at Niall’s house. One way or another it comes out that Niall was Kate’s favorite during the 1D era. The scene would have included loads of teasing and maybe a tinge of jealous Harry.

What inspired you to write “Collide”? How did you come up with the story idea?The whole concept of ‘Collide’ came about when quarantine happened and the world went into lockdown. With there being hardly any new content, we were all basically just reblogging old Harry posts. So each part is inspired by and based off of a past Harry photo/event etc. It's been really fun to tie them all together in one story.

Some readers are wary of leaving feedback because they're unsure how the writer will take it, how do you personally like to receive feedback? Do you want to be critiqued, or would you like to just know if they did or didn't enjoy what they've read? Every writer loves feedback. Honestly, feedback is the most incredible gift a reader could give a writer. Pressing ‘post’ on your own blood, sweat and tears is one of the most nauseatingly nerve wracking things ever, so to be acknowledged for it (through messages and sharing) is priceless. As far as a critique goes, there’s a fine line. Personally, if there’s something I’m writing that’s offensive or off putting, I absolutely want to know (in a positive, uplifting, non-anon-asshole way). But if my story’s just not their cup of tea, I’d rather they move along to the next fic out there.

Is writing a hobby or do you have aspirations of writing professionally outside of fanfiction?Only a hobby!

And finally, What's your purpose for writing? What do you hope to accomplish? My purpose in everything I write is to provide a little escape for myself and my readers from this crazy world. Most, if not all, of my stories are meant to be lighthearted and fun - a decent way to step out of yourself for a short moment.

Author of the Month interview with @stylishmuser !

Did you start writing fanfiction for One Direction, or was there another fandom that you wrote fanfiction for before this?The first ever fanfic I wrote was actually for Gossip Girl. It was horribly written, but I had so much fun. After that I wrote Harry Potter fanfiction for about a year, and then I started getting into 1D, and I don’t imagine I’ll ever write for another fandom.

How old were you when you started writing fanfiction? I think I was a sophomore in high school, so… 16, maybe?

What’s been your favorite fic that you’ve written to work on so far?Oh this is hard to answer, to be honest. It probably sounds cliche but I’ve had a favorite aspect in every one of my fics. I think Timeless will always have a special place in my heart, but I have a favorite thing each one of them.

Is there a fic that you really wanted to write, but you just never did?Oh hmmm I think there are a lot of tropes I want to try my hand at, but I don’t like writing a story that’s been done a million times before, so it’s kind of finding an aspect or angle to it to make it different.

What’s your favorite trope to write? Idk if it’s a trope but, angst with a happy ending!

What’s your ideal space to write in? Honestly, I can write almost anywhere. It just needs to be quiet. I like to write in my living room or at the kitchen counter at like 2 am when everyone else is asleep.

What inspires you to write? I really just like to tell stories. I think words kind of have this power to them. I also am inspired by Harry and Niall, their lifestyles/music/careers, and telling stories about/for WOC. When I was growing up, I always thought that people like me didn’t really deserve love stories. So I guess it’s kind of destroying that notion that inspires me too!

Do you typically like to listen to music when you write? If so, what do you listen to? I used to, actually. That first fic I ever wrote was fueled by listening to Mind of Mine on repeat haha. Now I like the quiet, but sometimes if I’m stuck I’ll listen to the playlist for whatever story I’m writing.

Do you have any plans for any future fic ideas you’d like to pursue? This made me laugh because I have four in my mind at any given time. You’ll have to wait and see what they are!

What is your writing process like? It goes something like this: vague idea > random scene ideas that bug me into writing it > visuals > outline > actually writing it.

Do you prefer Au or OU? I prefer OU because I like writing about the music aspect of the boys’ lives. AU is fun too, but it’s a lot more work in my opinion. It needs to be a specific idea or trope or I’ll just go with OU.

Is there a schedule you follow in terms of when you write? Or are you more impulsive and just write where and when you can? I try to keep myself to some sort of schedule, like 1000 words a night or 1 chapter per weekend or I get off track.

What is one thing you wish you would’ve known before you started writing? Oh hmm… I think I would go back and tell myself that it’s okay to want to write WOC characters and it doesn’t matter who likes it, or who doesn’t, or how many notes you get. I think it’s really easy for writers — no matter what they write — to feel like they aren’t living up to whatever popularity standards are going on in their fandom, but at the end of the day it’s about what YOU love to write about. That’s what makes a good story, in my opinion, and as a reader you can tell when an author is really putting their heart into something, and that’s kind of inspiring.

What do you prefer writing, multi-chaptered fics or one shots? Multi chapter. I freak out about one shots now because they end up being 15 or 20k words anyway when I write them haha!

What has been your favorite scene to write so far in “Rumor Has It”? I think my favorite scene from that story was either their first kiss, the morning after they get intimate for the first time, or the scene where Ishika comes clean to Harry about how she feels/why she lied. I remember those three scenes came so clearly to me, I was just stabbing away at my keyboard like a cartoon.

You have such complex characters that readers adore, do you have any advice on planning well written and planned characters? AH that is a very nice thing for you to say! Thank you! I like to think of characters in terms of fatal flaws. It sounds weird but like: What makes your character cry? What keeps them up at night? What makes them happy, or mad? What makes them, them? That’s kind of how I approach it. It’s kind of finding a balance of those characteristics and ‘why are you so frustrating I want to THUMP you’ and ‘I adore them, let’s protect them at all costs.’

What inspired you to write “Kiss and Cry”? How did you come up with the story idea? So I watched this show called “Spinning Out” on Netflix and kind of geeked out about figure skating. I knew nothing about it, which is kind of what got me thinking, this would be cool to learn about and writing for me is the best way to learn. At first I was like, nobody cares about a figure skating fic, and then I was like: good, write it. So here we are!

Some readers are wary of leaving feedback because they're unsure how the writer will take it, how do you personally like to receive feedback? Do you want to be critiqued, or would you like to just know if they did or didn't enjoy what they've read? I think feedback is a really personal thing, but there’s a really fine line (haha) approaching it. I really think constructive criticism is an important part of feedback — but it’s often done very poorly. There is a big difference between pointing out to an author what they could’ve done better, or even asking why they wrote something the way they did (because I promise you, they did it the way they did for a reason), and simply telling them they are either a bad writer, have poorly written something, or something worse because god knows we’ve all gotten it lmao. For me, I don’t mind either. But if you’re going to criticize my writing, do it one on one, not on anon where you can add a bite to your words. Feedback is kind of a two way conversation, and I think that’s often forgotten about — especially on Tumblr. And it’s very, very obvious when people do want to act unkind, and say unkind things behind the anon veil on purpose. It’s ok not to like the way someone wrote something, but it’s not ok to be vicious about it, ESPECIALLY on anon. That just makes you a coward. I guess my rule of thumb is: Is what you’re typing out going to hurt the person on the other end? Is it worth it to do that? Or can you reword it in a way that starts a conversation instead of bullying someone for putting their work out there, something that’s vulnerable no matter how many times you do it. But, this is just how I feel. Every writer is different (and valid!)

Is writing a hobby or do you have aspirations of writing professionally outside of fanfiction? I’d love to write professionally one day! We’ll see what happens. I think whether it happens or not, I just love it so much, I’ll do it for a long time because it’s a big part of who I am.

And finally, What's your purpose for writing? What do you hope to accomplish? My purpose of writing… that’s so philosophical. I guess, I honestly just like to tell stories that are important to me, and remind people that life sucks but it’s also pretty damn good at times too. I hope to keep making myself happy writing whatever it is I’m writing, and challenge myself to try my hand at stuff that’s daunting, and hopefully people like what I’m doing and if not, that’s ok, because I do! And to remember that’s my real purpose for writing, it’s never been a numbers game or keeping score, it’s been about telling stories that I love crafting.

#author of the month #aom #October 2020 #aomoctober2020

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im-gettingby · 3 years

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30 Days of Carry On

posted (and written by?) @captain-aralias

(I’m doing most of these at once because I said so. it’s long so under the cut)

1. Favourite major character

I literally thought — Simon no Baz no Penny no, Agatha!

I guess I will pick Simon, since I relate to him the most — or at least, my connection to him led me into the fandom.

2. Favourite minor character

I think we all know this one 🐑🐑🐑

I have written many a treatise on Lamb Rights. I’ll spare everyone now

3. Character you relate to the most

Oops— I already answered this, kinda. I relate to them in different ways: I relate a lot to WS Simon because he has abandonment issues and “kid who was told he was extraordinary and then grew up to be ordinary” issues. We also both have a “fix all the things for everyone” complex, too.

Baz — It took me a while to get into Baz’s head, but I would say, I relate to him because of his intense emotional world and tendency to see the world through an intensely romantic/tragic lens. But also he’s a Pisces. and I’d never do that like a Pisces does. (Sorry, not sorry.)

4. Which character would you like to go to lunch with?

SHEPARD obviously. I don’t feel the need to elaborate.

5. Favourite non-Snowbaz ship

Ooh! Probably Lamb/Baz or Simon/Shep or just...literally anything. Like, I will read anything as long as it’s well written. The weirder the better. (Within...legal and moral limits.) in my other fandoms I’ve been a big multishipper and there’s not a lot of options for that in CO - which is fine - but wholeheartedly support rarepairs :D

6. Favourite non-romantic OTP

So, obviously Simon/Penny and Baz/Penny are great ones, but I think the nearest & dearest to my heart is Simon/Agatha. The kind of siblings/unwillingly dating/weird exes dynamic and the way they both shaped each other’s lives is just so interesting. And while Simon & Penny are closer, Agatha and Simon represent their aspirational selves to one another. And the way that they were both tied to one another along with their gender roles/places in society and both broke away at the same time is just...mwah

7. Favourite Baz outfit

I honestly dress kinda like Baz. Anything involving a printed silk shirt or a floral brocade suit, so like, all of them? I love WS Baz, his fashion sense is so thoughtful yet fun. He’s so expressive with it — in the sense of both being guarded, being sexy, and playing with masculinity/femininity.

8. How do you feel about Wayward Son?

In case it wasn’t obvious, I absolutely love it. I mean, from a writing/narrative standpoint, I don’t think it’s the most elegant or engaging book ever written, but it’s just so raw and fresh. I don’t see many examples of an author trying to do what Rainbow did, which is build a complex emotional AND plot-driven story with so many characters and so much lore. I’m very excited for AWTWB.

9. Favourite scene from Carry On, besides Chapter 61

I like what the book does/sets up overall. Honestly probably the first scene, where Simon walks to the bus stop & takes the train and just thinks about his life and makes lists -- I love Simon. I know Rainbow said she thinks that bit is boring, but it honestly says so much about his character in a short time. (and he’s an extremely complex character!) Also, Baz’s dramatic entrance. Also, the chapter where Baz says “and I’m hopelessly in love with him” because it’s just so dramatic, and it comes out of nowhere

10. Favourite scene from Wayward Son, besides Chapter 41

Baz and Lamb’s journey across the Strip - vampire lore, jealous Simon, Baz getting to be his own character— it’s beautiful.

11. Remind us about something in canon readers might have forgotten about

Ahahaha um. Simon says he thinks Baz’s cousin Marcus is fit. That’s pretty funny.

12. What are your hopes and fears for Any Way the Wind Blows?

I don’t have any hopes because I don’t want to be disappointed - and that’s not a cynical thing, I just want to go into it with an open mind. (I’ll take a break from fandom and reread the books beforehand so I’m (more of) a blank slate) I guess just...interesting emotional journeys, whatever that ends up being. There’s a lot that Rainbow has to do in the book and I don’t think any one person could get through all of it -- that’s why we have fanfiction.

Fears? I don’t know. I think just...the series ending. Even though I’ve been in fandom for less than a year I just really love this fandom & the thought of that kind of eroding away is sad. But also I don’t think that will happen immediately, and change is a part of life. I’ve never related as much to Cath as I do now :’)

13. An unpopular/cracky opinion you hold

unpopular: Lamb is the best character; I don’t want Simon to get his magic back; both Simon and Baz should have other romantic options.

14. Something from your head fanon

Hmmmmmmm well. Just mean things about Baz really. Like that he’s weird looking, not that great at football, and actually has kind of garish fashion sense. (which is a self-roast as well - see above.) I just feel like Simon/fandom put him on a pedestal, and Simon’s an unreliable narrator re: Baz anyway. So I like the idea that Baz is this average looking kinda strange nerdy guy who is everything Simon has ever wanted in life.

And before you tell me that Baz was hot at Watford and Agatha was into him, have you ever been to a tiny boarding school? Standards get weird 😂😂😂 and Terry being into him — come on. The guy’s a violent pervert.

also - back to Watford being a tiny school. Baz doesn’t have much competition to be the star of the football team. (also, does anyone except Simon even think that he is?)

16. Favourite location other than Watford

Vegas!

17, Favourite location in Watford

I’m pretty bad at Watford lore/geography bc again, I’m way more into WS. Probably the floor in the Cloisters where everything happens the same way, just a day later. There’s a fic there, but I can’t wrap my head around all the time travel implications enough to write it.

18. What would be your favourite subject at Watford?

Any potions-esque subject because I loved chemistry lab. Latin because I loved Latin in school. Uhhhh I don’t like history class, so not that — maybe a literature course focused on the derivation of spells.

19. What would your magical implement be?

Ooh! This is a good one. I’d like to think it would be a weird body piercing. Or a belt a la Gareth. Maybe some kind of traditional south Asian jewelry, like a nose chain or mang-tikka or something. maybe a hat. like, imagine your magical instrument being a fedora and you just have to...wear a fedora all the time.

21. Favourite canon spell

Hm. Kiss it better? Candle in the wind?I should try to think of a non-horny one. honestly they’re all so cool and clever - I love the magic system in CO/WS.

22. What would your eighth year spell at Watford be or do?

Maybe something from a poem I love. That would probably be pretty but not very functional. Or a healing spell.

23. Who would you want as your roommate?

Agatha is uptight, Penny is passive aggressive, Simon is a slob, Baz is both uptight and passive aggressive.

Definitely Shepard.

24. Favourite item of merchandise, official or unofficial

My @subparselkie sticker

25. Favourite book cover design

WS. Oh, another unpopular opinion - I don’t like the kevin wada cover of carry on. their faces look so weird and the colors don’t work for me. I own the version with the blue and yellow cover art instead

26. Do you want a movie? If yes - any fan casts for the movie?

Probably wouldn’t want a movie! Because I am way too possessive of these books/this version of the story. And I am historically extremely disappointed by adaptations — I get upset with the smallest of changes 😂

27. If they made a movie, what scenes do you think they’d cut that you’d be furious were missing?

See above. A LOT haha

28. If you could ask Rainbow Rowell one question, what would it be? (If you have already, you can share if you like)

What is Lamb’s full name????? Is it actually Lamb Lambert Lamborghini the third???

What is Rainbow’s relationship with sheep and goats. Why are there so many references to them

29. Have you read any of Rainbow’s other books?

Only Fangirl

30. How did you get into Carry On and/or Carry On fandom?

I read fangirl & the pages at the end mentioned carry on, so I read that, and enjoyed it but I wasn’t obsessed. Then I read WS spring 2020, reread it a bunch of times, reread CO, freaked out about the cliffhanger/cool vampire stuff/unresolved sexual tension, had pandemic cabin fever, got on AO3, and the rest is history.

As @annabellelux knows, I wrote my first (published) fanfic after reading her amazing fic Drop The Game. and the first fanfic I read was @captain-aralias’ Greener Grass. I was so obsessed that about a month later, I searched through the AO3 tags for it, because I couldn’t remember the title or author but kept thinking about it.

#tag game #30 days of carry on

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kholran · 3 years

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Fic Tag Game

Once again I saw this before work and then promptly forgot to do it when I got home. So I’m doing it now at almost 2:30 am. As always, thanks to @vishcount for the tag!

Name: Kholran (or Khol)

This is my go-to screen name for just about everything. I made it up for a tabletop RP character that I never ended up actually playing. So I stole his name for myself and have been using it ever since. Chances are if you encounter a Kholran anywhere online, it’s me.

Fandoms: Since this is specifically about fic, I’m going to limit it to fandoms I’ve written in. Because otherwise we’d be here all night.

Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit: Specifically Bard/Thranduil (Barduil). It literally took one exchanged glance on screen and I was totally sold on this ship. I wrote more for them than any other ship I’ve shipped. AUs, canon, you name it I wrote it for them.

Les Miserables: Ok so let me start by saying I’ve been a huge fan of the musical since middle school, when the 10th Anniversary Dream Cast happened. I read the Brick in 7th grade. So I didn’t JUST jump on the bandwagon when the movie came out. But that Les Mis renaissance did inspire me to write my one and only fic in the fandom. A Titanic AU that turned out less cracky than intended. Don’t judge me.

Guardian: So technically speaking I haven’t PUBLISHED any Weilan fic yet. But I do have the first four and a half chapters of a mermaid AU finished. And I plan on getting back to it and finishing it once I stop obsessing over my pool noodle in-

DMBJ/Lost Tomb: Something about cdrama gives me plot bunnies. And adopted side characters. And rarepair pool noodles, apparently. This is where I’m living right now, paddling around on the SS Risang.

Tropes: Uhh. I’m positive I write tropes but it’s not like a conscious thing? I guess angst with a happy ending is where it’s at? Considering I love me some damaged characters, it’s almost impossible not to write a lot of angst into my fics. But I also want to give them love and happiness and cookies.

Fic I spent most time on: I think probably the aforementioned Weilan mermaid AU. Because I started it last...September? Maybe? And I haven’t finished it yet.

Favorite fic(s) you’ve written:

I’m happy to report that I don’t...hate...my old fics? Like I can re-read them and sometimes even think I’m not half bad at this hobby. But at the same time I fall into the mindset of “Oh that could have been better. I should have done this differently. I want to change that so bad. Man I wish I’d finished this series.”

So I think I’ll have to say the Under Your Skin Barduil series, featuring soulmate tattoos. I wish I hadn’t gotten too insecure to finish it because I had a whole big idea plotted out that I just never ended up writing. I like what I did finish though. And then I think my very favourite is my Risang pool noodle baby, I Will Go Now to My Pyre. Not only is it my rarepair crowning glory (in that I named the ship, was the first one in the tag, and got more than one “I never even thought about this ship before but I’m into it” comments), but I’ve put so much time and sweat and tears into it. (PS I promise I’m working on the conclusion! It’s 7k words and counting!)

Fic I spent least time on: I don’t even know. Maybe I Get By? From concept to publishing I think it was only a few days.

Longest fic: It’s definitely GOING to be the Weilan AU. But currently it’s In Every Age, the Les Mis Titanic AU. I Will Go Now to My Pyre might end up beating that one by the time it’s done. We’ll see.

Shortest fic: AO3 says it’s Run, which was the intro to a Barduil Zombie Apocalypse AU. But it didn’t get much of a response so I never continued it past the brief intro.

Most hits/kudos/comments/bookmarks:

Hits and Kudos: And Here My Troubles Begin, part 3 of Under Your Skin. Not surprised. It has porn in it.

Comments: I Will Go Now to My Pyre, and I cannot thank all of you enough for validating my pool noodle this way!

Fic you want to rewrite/expand on: Um. Literally all of them. Like I said above, as soon as I re-read them, I want to re-WRITE them. Because I think I can always make them better. But I guess I’ll really say the Under Your Skin series. Also like I said above, I had a whole storyline planned out for that and I’m sad I didn’t get around to fleshing it out.

Share a bit of a WIP: Ok, here’s a tiny sneak peek of the next (I say next instead of last even though it’s supposed to be the last because the word count is getting away from me and it might end up split) chapter of I Will Go Now to My Pyre:

“Did you do this yourself?” he asked, grimacing at the state of the bandage as he started to cut it away, slowly revealing the marred skin beneath. The question was met with silence, and Liu Sang briefly glanced up from what he was doing. Zhang Rishan had an odd expression on his face, like he'd somehow misinterpreted what Liu Sang was asking. “The bandage. Did you do it yourself?”

“Oh.” Relief? That was weird. What had Zhang Rishan thought he meant? “Yes. I spent some time in the Army a while back,” Zhang Rishan replied, as if that explained everything.

Liu Sang watched him for a moment longer before turning his focus back to his task. Everything about the dressing and the wrapping was wrong, and half the gashes he'd revealed needed stitching. He wondered if they'd even been cleaned first. Probably not, given the warmth of Zhang Rishan's skin and the angry reddened edges of the wounds. “Not as a medic, I hope,” he muttered after a beat.

I tag: ALL of my writer friends. I want to know all about your projects. TELL ME.

#mine #things i'm tagged in #my writing

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clarionglass · 3 years

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tagged by @dheiress to post the first line of my last 20 fics (thank you! <3)

Rules: List the first lines of your last 20 stories (if you have less than 20, just list them all!). See if there are any patterns. Choose your favorite opening line. Then tag 10 other authors!

aight my lads here we go, there’s going to be a few unpublished wips and other piece of dubious writing in here bc i doubt i have 20 stories but anyway, here we go (this is very long! press j to skip or just get that dash scrollin bc this might take a while :// ) in very rough chronological order going backwards, starting with the published work:

1. so i ran to the river (tma grifters au, unpublished yet but will be soon!): The sunlight feels different on a face fresh out of prison, and it feels even better to Jonathan Sims now that he’s truly home.

2. crowned by an overture bold and beyond (tma pretentious college au, based loosely on the secret history): It was a cool, rainy day in late March when I first approached the Magnus Institute--one of those days that served as a reminder that the London spring, that fragile creature, was still all too vulnerable to the occasional strike from the claws of winter.

3. we should ride this wave to shore (tma chatfic where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts): Friday, 3:14 P.M. “archives research & statement envestigation” Timothy Stoker renamed the group “drinks drinks drinks” Timothy Stoker changed Sasha James’s nickname to saucy sash Timothy Stoker changed Martin Blackwood’s nickname to martini kart Timothy Stoker changed his nickname to stonked stonked: so how bout it lads saucy sash: oh god.

4. i am the maker of rules (dealing with fools) (tma chatfic, an elias-and-peter-focused accompaniment to wsrtwts): Monday, 7:39 P.M. Elias Bouchard to Peter Lukas Elias Bouchard: Peter, I need to talk to you. Elias Bouchard: I’ve had the most infuriating day at work.

5. An Optimistic Tragedy (good omens orchestra au that i swear to god i’ll finish one day): Three years ago Eve shifted in her chair, her mind clearly on things other than Milhaud and the music in front of her.

6. The Spaces Between the Stars (the Beast of a dw fic that i can’t even begin to describe; a mate and i have been working on this since 2015 and it’s a sprawling mass of writing that encompasses Many google docs--what’s on ao3 atm is a very small percentage of it,,,,): The Doctor clutched the TARDIS railing as if somehow, it could take the pain away.

7. Carol of the Bells (a chrismas chatfic companion to aot! i’ve always been a sucker for a chatfic but oof looking back on this one my formatting style sure has changed): [Friday December 13, 1:31am] Anthony Crowley to Angelface: u up? ;)

8. An Exploration into The Nature of Human Beings, sub. Homo Sapiens: A Research Paper by Milton Jones (british comedy rpf. this is my oldest piece on ao3 and it shows, but there’s a special place in my heart for this dorky lil fic about an alien researcher making a place for himself in british comedy. fun fact! i actually added the final three sentences to this a couple of days ago, and will post it when i do my next fic update): <<I knew you’d be down here, as per usual. Do you never stop working?>>

and now for the stuff that i like but hasn’t yet/will never/one day, if i get my act together, might be posted to ao3... please ask me about these bc i love them, even though i’ll probably never post them :)

9. untitled mitchell spy comedy (a show that @monimolimnion and i want to pitch to the bbc in which david mitchell and victoria coren mitchell are married spies who work for MI5 and MI6 respectively, and most of britcom pops up in one place or another. it’s nothing more than a Lot of planning and a few snippets, but i love returning to this doc): [David is sitting at his desk, shaking his head at an open file.] David: They’re taking the piss. That’s what they’re doing, they’re taking the piss.

10. In the Demonic Style (a good omens au of @teashoesandhair’s glorious smooching contest piece, which is the first piece of fiction writing in the reblog chain. i’ve promised a chapter 2 to this, which i’m halfway through, and feel incredibly guilty for not finishing. still, my quarter-year’s resolution is to finish something old whenever i post something new, so maybe it’ll get done soon!): “It’s the end of the world” was not a good statement with which to start one’s morning in any circumstances, but the angel Bryndael was in the middle of cataloguing his newest shipment of tea samples when said statement reached his ears, and he didn’t much appreciate being disturbed.

11. magpie (good omens canon-mostly-compliant fic based around the song magpie by the unthanks/the magpie folk song/nursery rhyme): Wednesday (approximately 11 years before the end of the world) From a bird’s-eye view, St James’s Park was beautiful at this time of year.

12. untitled ficlet for tales of dwrwedd (a present for my writing buddy! the link is to her fic, i just wrote a bit of her two witcherverse ocs being soft as hell): The two women seated by the hearth didn't look old, either of them. But there was something about the pair--in their movements, or their mannerisms--that suggested an age far beyond what their unlined faces would suggest.

13: Tempo d’Attacco (an original bit of Light Crime a la midsomer murders, set in a university music department that is naturally a thinly-veiled copy of my own, hence why it will never ever be posted anywhere. i wrote this for my supervisor at the end of honours (her character is the sleuth) :P ) Dr Marisa Tan didn’t exactly start her morning well, on the day that everything seemed to upend itself.

patterns...... i’m not seeing that many, tbh? idk if i could call this in media res, but there’s certainly a good bit of plot starting without heaps of setup.

my favourite? hmmmmmm i’d say my favourites would be crowned by an overture bold and beyond, and in the demonic style. i gotta say, going back to revisit a lot of my older writing has been nice! time and distance have been v kind :)

i’m hella bad at tagging things so if you see this and want to share your own writing please go ahead! i’m very shy when it comes to Fandom Interaction (tm) so i don’t feel comfortable launching myself into people’s notes (i loved this tho! i just need other people to make the first move lol), however i will give a specific shoutout to @monimolimnion whose writing i adore and who needs to do this!

#clari speaks #clari writes #long post

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teacup-tai · 4 years

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Top Five of 2020

Rules: It’s time to love yourselves! Choose your 5 (ish) favourite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought into the world in 2020. Tag as many writers/artists/etc. as you want (fan or original) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome works!

My lovely @the-starryknight thanks for the tag! I’ll tag a few people, but you probably already did it: @ruinsplume @kasjophe @gallifrey1sburning @quicksilvermaid @prolix- @dazedandinked

Right. This year was insane, I got stuck first half of the year in Ireland with only 2 friends close by, all my family in Brazil or Spain while I was writing my bloody master thesis (that is what I’m proudest of this year, but it’s not published yet, so won’t go in this list). I managed a lot of hard emotions in solitude, by myself, while reading drarry fics to keep afloat (great coping mechanism, actually!). And after handing my thesis and moving to Spain, I was feeling deeply empty. So I went back to fic-writing, after 2 or 3 years of not even looking at my old fics.

It all started when I saw the posts for prompt claiming on the @hd-hurtfest blog. To think how that post changed everything in my life is just bizarre. So I am very thankful! It has been a huge pleasure to go back to fic-writing and to re-embrace the HP fandom, mainly the drarry squad! To get to know so many lovely people and I’m forever grateful for that.

Here is my Top Five:

hear me (with your whole body): (Drarry, E, 9k) this is the fic I wrote for the hd-hurtfest 2020. I saw @quicksilvermaid’s prompt and I shivered. It lured me so much I had the whole plot in my head as soon as I finished sending the claim. It was so hard to write it. Because the topic is very sensitive: open relationships, sexual mismatch, bad communication skills. I brought most of my bad experiences in all these sensitive topics as if I was purging it from my body while writing ‘hear me’. It was a very raw process of looking into my own still bleeding wounds, but very cathartic. And it was hard because it was my very first drarry (I love drarry and I normally only read drarry, but I’ve never felt confident enough to write it), so I was very nervous. And in bloody English xD LOL but I’m bloody proud of it. I wanted to write something real without making a show of blaming one of the parts, at the same time I wanted to use and unreliable POV (Harry’s) and to bring forth all those very uncomfortable realities of jealousy, insecurity of one’s sexuality etc. in a way people could relate to. I’ve never imagined the response to this fic would be so nice, and many of the comments drove me to deep reflection. I’m specially happy about this fic because after writing ‘hear me’ something cracked open inside of me, in my own personal-romantic life and also in writing. Like a small miracle. And then, I couldn’t stop writing anymore.

Rebel Rebel: (Sirius/Remus. E, 5k) heh, Wolfstar is my OTP *-* So writing this tiny fic with ‘there was no war’ prompt for the sirius black fest was a bloody delight. The feeling of exploring their youth, in the early 80s and the whole atmosphere of that time was exhilarating! Bowie’s concerts, HIV+ and Aids, queer community and old school crushes. Giving them a future and professions was fun as fuck. But the best part was making Sirius Black fuck around, wild and free, you know. Because he bloody well deserved it. I love the writing style I explored there, very influenced by Caio Fernando Abreu, one of my favourite Brazilian writers and it was just great great fun!

Dragons Don’t Know Paradise: (Drarry + Wolfstar, E, 40k+ WIP) I need to post 3 more chapters along this next few days. I’m adding Dragons here because NEVER. IN. MY. LIFE I thought this story would come out of my head into the pages, and I’m so bloody happy, so bloody proud of myself. I cannot believe how much I’ve written in a month, about a plot that had some path in my head but never a shape, and how this all blossomed inside of me and how it’s coming out just brilliantly. I know I’ll think back at some point and think this and that are not great. But I think this fic is one of my best works, it deals with the queer community, with depression and acceptance, with HIV+ folk, and deep emotions. Everything I’ve ever dreamed of writing. And here it is, and writing it made me manage the fact that I wouldn’t be able to spend this xmas with my family, so I spent this last month with this characters and feeling the opposite of lonely. And to be able to write Harry having a family, you know, being raised by Remus and Sirius is just marvellous. I’m over the moon with wolfstar being great gaydads :D

Scorching: (Pansmione, E, 1.5k) first time I translated a Portuguese fic of mine to English. It was fun to do it, as it’s purely smutty smut and well, I love pansmione and it makes me greedy to go back to writing about this ship. I like how it turned out, but it’s not beta-ed so maybe it’s not great. But damn, I really like this Pansy. ^^

The Old Ways: (Voldemort/Walburga, M, 3k). So, I have a whole word document full of snippets on the Black family. As the Black family is my huge guilty pleasure (that’s why Tainara Black has been my pen name since 2005). I don’t like to think Walburga was only a mad pureblood bigoted woman, I like to think of her as being strongly magical and very sure of herself. Someone three-dimensional with knowledge of Dark magic of the old ways and a deep insanity that comes with legacy of pureness, but also with financial influence and management of old wizarding land. I realised Walburga is only 1 year older than Voldie, she is closest to his age than her husband or brother (if we follow the Balck Family Genealogical Tree), and this sparked a whole idea inside of me. So this fic is a character study of Walburga when Sirius is only 10 and Voldemort is organising a war, and I honestly think is one of my best fics (even though it wasn’t beta-ed). I loved writing about this powerful witch, that got stuck in keeping her bloodline alive, that gave up on great deeds of power and freedom to become a pureblood mother and wife. But it’s the fic no one reads, so I’m adding a bit of it here in hopes it may interest someone:

He climbs the last step of the noisy, rusty, winding stair, his eyes mapping the place in silent wonder. The rooftop is sombre. Rough grey cement floor and dead flower beds in a far corner, big dark clay pots with dead branches and dry bushes scattered around; the only living thing is an imposing carnivorous plant, it’s toothed lips opening and closing sharply around bugs and other insects.

She is right there, in the centre of the chaotic rooftop garden and he thinks the house is in shambles, and so is she. The moon is reflecting its cold brightness over her as if it were a stage light. He takes a second to contemplate her stance. He has never seen her like this before. It is such an incongruous sight it almost feels like he’s intruding. Is not a feeling he’s used to.

She’s perched in a high frail copper chair, her ankles crossed lightly, with pale bare feet against the dirty coarse floor, one white arm falling languidly from the armrest, her elegant fingers holding a thin long smoking pipe. Rings of smoke rising into the night sky. The back of her skull resting on the back of the chair, he can’t see her face from this angle, but he’s stunned by the imagery.

She looks almost mythical; with her long black mane messy and loose, barely touching the ground. He can’t remember when was the last time he’s seen her hair down, but he’s pretty sure it wasn’t that long, nor were there silver strikes colouring it in a mix of salt and pepper.

“How long do you plan to stare?” her voice is as rusty as the whole house and he scoffs.

keep reading

#my writing #my fics #tainara black #top five 2020

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